A Declarative Approach to Configuring Business-to- Business Conversations
Derek Mortimer, Nicholas John Cook · 2010
Business-to-business (B2B) interactions typically involve the exchange of documents and messages to achieve specific goals. This has led to the development of standards allowing the specification of complete electronic conversations detailing the syntax, semantics and sequencing of messages to be exchanged. As with paper based interactions, electronic conversations may be subject to agreements between partners, implying that both individual messages and entire conversations may have specific requirements imposed upon them. Ideally, an enterprise should be able to specify these requirements in a manner that is both declarative, freeing them from underlying technical concerns to focus solely on meeting their business obligations, and compatible with existing B2B conversation standards, to minimise re-engineering of existing business processes. A common such example is accountability, where all participants must be held accountable for their actions during an exchange. Accountability can be satisfied through the use of specific exchange protocols and digitally signed evidence. However, business level clients may not, and should not, have to be aware of these technical concerns when they can be automated at lower levels of operation. This paper describes an approach to transparently satisfying requirements for B2B conversations conducted using message oriented middleware, providing accountability support as a major example.