M. Brambilla, T. Hildebrandt (Eds.): BPMN 2017 Industrial Track Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org,
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Business Process Context for Message Standards
Nenad Ivezic
1,*
, Miroslav Ljubicic
1
, Marija Jankovic
1
, Boonserm Kulvatunyou
1
,
Scott Nieman
2
, and Garret Minakawa
3
1
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA
{nivezic,miroslav.ljubicic,marija.jankovic,serm}@nist.gov
2
Land O’Lakes, Shoreview, MN, USA
stnieman@landolakes.com
3
Oracle, Redwood City, CA, USA
garret.minakawa@oracle.com
Abstract. Despite unrelenting increase in complexity of message standards
for enterprise systems integrations, there are no effective means to address this
complexity issue in practice. We describe an effort to address the issue by
advancing message standards development and use methods. The new effort relies
on business process model life-cycle management, which is essential for context
definition of message standards usage. Context is essential as it describes the intent
for the message standards usage in a specific systems integration case. We report
results of a preliminary assessment of the approach for an industry use case.
Keywords: systems integration. message standards. life-cycle management.
business process model. context
1 Introduction
Efficient, practical, systems integration continues to be a great challenge for
enterprises of all sizes, in great part because of the increasing complexities of
message standards for the integration. The Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGi)
is one of the original consortia that standardize message-exchange standards [1].
Without a means to manage a shareable context specification, OAGi members have
seen the message standards becoming complex and their management unwieldy.
Business processes are prime candidate to supply context specification for the
messages involved in information exchanges. This has been recognized for many
decades, starting with the activity modeling language IDEF0 where inputs and
outputs capture the business data to be exchanged between activities [2]. The OAGi
consortium has taken first steps to offer BPMN-based standards for business
processes to provide precise context for message exchanges [3].
Recently, BPMN 2.0, with its BPMN.xsd representation and runtime execution
capability, has accelerated the design, development, and implementation of message