Choreography of ebXML business collaborations

The ebXML framework consists of eight loosely coupled specifications for conducting e-Business. The choreography of ebXML business processes is defined by instances of the business process specification schema (BPSS). The BPSS is defined as an XML schema. It specifies elements describing the inter-organizational business processes, called business collaborations, but does not concentrate on intra-organizational business processes. Most of the underlying semantics were derived from the meta model of the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM). In this paper we describe the characteristics of ebXML business collaborations. We demonstrate how these concepts are captured by UMM and BPSS. These concepts must be supported by any proposed alternative business process interchange format in order to bridge between ebXML and other approaches, or even to replace BPSS.