K. Bauknecht, A M. Tjoa, G. Quirchmayr (Eds.): EC-Web 2002, LNCS 2455, pp. 353–362, 2002. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002 Designing Business Processes in E-commerce Applications Hans Albrecht Schmid 1 and Gustavo Rossi 2 1 University of Applied Sciences, Konstanz, Germany. schmidha@fh-konstanz.de 2 LIFIA-Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina gustavo@sol.info.unlp.edu.ar Abstract. Business processes play an important role in E-commerce Web applications as they form an important part of the B2C domain and dominate the B2B domain. However, E-commerce application modeling and design techniques have eluded the special characteristics of business processes by treating them just as a special case of navigation. As a consequence, the resulting E-commerce applications have design and usability problems as well as erroneous results from business process execution. We propose a solution to E-commerce Web application design where business processes are considered first class citizens. In this paper we first demonstrate why modeling business processes is important. After a brief introduction, we extend the Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Method (OOHDM) with business processes. We show that our approach to E-commerce Web application design involving both hypermedia navigation and business processes is easy and clear and does not cause the listed problems. 1 Introduction In the last few years, a new generation of Web applications has emerged; they differ from purely navigational applications because they use the Web to support and execute business processes and workflows [7][9]. For example, E-commerce applications for rental and reservation services are formed mainly by business processes; auctions and Web shops combine them with navigation. However, both the underlying nature of the Web (as a document-centric information base) and the associated design and implementation tools have not evolved to support the new requirements of E-commerce Web applications. Although a business process has characteristics that are quite different from navigation in hypermedia applications, most Web application modeling and design methods like WebML [2] and HDM2000 [1] treat it as a byproduct of a navigation sequence and do not model and design it explicitly. The consequences for the resulting E-commerce applications are design problems as well as usability problems and erroneous results of business process execution.