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Astract: Business transactions between companies are more and more executed by a flow of well-defined electronic business documents. The resulting inter-organizational business processes are often realized by concepts known from service-oriented computing. Exchanging a business document corresponds to a service call and the input/output of the service calls commonly follows a certain business document standard. However, these standards typically present the superset of all required elements used in any business context. In a specific context (in a specific industry, in a specific geopolitical region, etc.) the input/output is adjusted to this context by constraints on the generic structure. Accordingly, a specific service is always used in a specific context. It follows that it is important to define the business context of a service (in a structured format). For this purpose we have developed the Business Context Ontology model (BCOnt). In this paper we elaborate on the theoretical concepts and the underlying algorithms as well as on their implementation in practice.

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Astract: The Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology is a powerful and well accepted approach towards the design of enterprise information systems in the academic world. However, it still lacks application in industry products. Software like ERP applications might benefit from REA data structure by building their product's core on a robust, economic theory based, business ontology. Consequently, we have lately started a feasibility study with an Austrian ERP vendor, in which we investigate whether or not the ERP vendor can use the REA ontology as basis for their new ERP system. This paper is aimed at raising questions about uncertainties in REA we came across in our study so far.

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Astract: Wozu UML @ Classroom? . Für erste Einblicke in die Grundlagen der objektorientierten Modellierung. . Für einen raschen und erfolgreichen Einstieg in die Welt der UML. . Für einen verständlichen Überblick über die Konzepte von UML. . Für ein effektives und effizientes Erlernen der grafischen Notation und Regeln von UML. . Für das Kennenlernen der wichtigsten UMLDiagramme: Anwendungsfalldiagramm, Klassendiagramm, Zustandsdiagramm, Sequenzdiagramm und Aktivitätsdiagramm. . Für ein besseres Verständnis des Zusammenspiels der verschiedenen Diagramme. Profitieren Sie von jahrelanger Erfahrung mit der UML in Lehre und Forschung!

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Astract: Inter-organizational systems span from business models over business process models to their execution on top of a service-oriented architecture. In our project BSopt we have developed an integrated model-driven approach that addresses the different layers and builds up-on well-estabilshed languages on each of these layers. When applying our integrated methodology we recognized that models for the same business case are similar, but still varying for different business partner networks. Accordingly, a systematic approach to derive a model from another model, i.e., from a reference model, is needed. Significant achievements have been made by the reference modeling community in finding ways to leverage the potentials of model reuse in business process modeling. In this paper we outline the potentials of adapting design techniques known from reference modeling to the specific needs of inter-organizational system develpment even if we do not provide a solution yet.

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Astract: The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and eBusiness (UN/CEFACT) provides the Core Components approach for defining standard business document types based on all-embracing, reusable building blocks. For utilizing standard business document types in concrete business scenarios, these standard business document types need customizing resulting in business document type variants. However, the current approach is missing sufficient mechanisms for managing the resulting variants. First, customizing standard business document types is currently based on a textual specification only. Hence, variability within business document types is missing an explicit representation. Second, supporting the process of customizing standard business document types requires dedicated tool-support. In this paper, we formalize variability within the Core Components approach by adopting concepts from variability management and introduce a declarative approach based on variability models for validating the process of business document type customization. Furthermore, we present an evaluation of the approach proposed by means of a feasibility study. The approach provides a generic method for validating customized standard business document types.