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Astract: Standardized business documents are a prerequisite for successful information exchange in electronic business transactions. The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and eBusiness (UN/CEFACT) provides a conceptual modeling approach, called Core Components, used by Business Partners (BPs) for defining business document models (BDMs). BDMs are essential for defining service interfaces in service-oriented systems. However, in such a highly dynamic environment with ever-changing market demands, BPs are confronted with the need to revise their BDMs resulting in a multitude of different versions. BPs may dictate the use of new versions of BDMs, but small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may not always adopt new BDM versions due to the cost and effort involved, inhibiting automated electronic information exchange. In this article, we propose a framework including (i) a classification of the impact of changes in BDMs, (ii) evolution templates for the automated transformation of business documents between different BDM versions, and (iii) mitigation strategies for evolutions where fully-automated and semantic-preserving transformations are not feasible. Having such a framework at hand provides SMEs with a low-cost and light-weight approach for dealing with evolving market requirements and hence evolving business documents. Finally, we analyze the evolution of UN/CEFACT's Cross Industry Invoice which has been mandated to be used for electronic invoicing within the European Union as well as present a critical discussion of the evolution templates defined.

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Astract: Current business document standards, such as EDIFACT, are defined in an all-embracing manner and, thus, usually include several thousands of elements. This is due to the fact that a standardized document type represents a superset of all data elements required in any industry, in any geopolitical region, etc. Furthermore, standardized document types are defined as stand-alone documents, similar to paper-based documents, comprising all information from previous process steps. In other words, standardization neglects the notion of processes by repeating information in different documents of the same process. In this paper, we propose a methodology for assessing redundancies in business document exchanges and evaluate different real-world industry message implementation guidelines (MIGs) with respect to their efficiency in reducing complexity and redundancies. Insights on redundancies can help companies and standardization committees to improve designs of MIGs and entire EDI standards. Furthermore, one can use the concepts presented in this paper to compare different MIGs with regard to their (dis)similarities, which might be useful when two organizations are to be merged and their IT systems consolidated.

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Astract: Business Process Management (BPM) has gained significant adoption in practice for enabling organizations to increase their effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. This broad adoption has not only been fostered by a rich and wellestablished theory to model, analyze, simulate, and enact business processes, but also by internationally accepted standards and mature technologies. Caused by the ever increasing speed and volatility of markets and the dynamics of new technologies, such as cloud infrastructures and mobile communications, we face a new generation of business processes, which we refer to as living inter-organizational processes. Such processes are not in control of one single organization; instead, they are enacted by multiple organizations, where no participating party possesses full control over the entire process. Such processes often involve a high number of actors that might even be unknown in advance. These actors require various degrees in participation, they are acting in heterogeneous environments. Moreover, such processes are often weakly structured or designed in an ad-hoc manner, and have to be continuously subject to evolution. Unfortunately, existing theories, methodologies, and technologies cannot cope with this challenging combination of aspects, which all have to be considered when dealing with living inter-organizational processes. The state of the art typically addresses singular aspects in isolation. However, a holistic approach to these challenges bears a tremendous potential. This paper aims to contribute towards a holistic approach to living inter-organizational processes. To this end, we describe different perspectives on inter-organizational processes and identify challenges for making them living processes.

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Astract: One and the same inter-organizational business process - such as e-procurement - may be executed differently in different industries, geopolitical regions, etc. Thus, a standardized reference model for inter-organizational business process must be customized to the specific business context (industry, region, etc.). In order to share, search, and (partially) re-use context specific adaptations it is essential not only to store the adaptations, but also a business context model where these adaptations are valid. Therefore, we present our ontology based business context model and explain how it can be applied to generic models of semantically interoperable data blocks, so-called Core Components. Core Components are standardized by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT), and their adaptations are exchanged between business partners in the course of inter-organizational business processes. If we could assign a business context to a business process, we could prevent negative trends in today's business, such as interoperability issues, inconsistencies and heterogeneous interpretations of the interchanged electronic business documents.

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Astract: Today, business processes are modeled without taking into deeper consideration the context of the business environment where they will be later executed. As a consequence, initiation, management and delayed adjustments of business processes are demanding, time-consuming and very often impossible tasks. In this paper we summarize crucial advantages and disadvantages of different Context modeling approaches, and we define the Context related to the scope of the business environment particularly. If we could assign a Business Context to a business process, we could undermine negative trends in today's business, such as interoperability issues, inconsistencies and heterogeneous interpretations of different business processes.