business-transaction message
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Subject: [business-transaction] BTP thinking applied to UN/CEFACT work
- From: Tony Fletcher <tony_fletcher@btopenworld.com>
- To: Business-Transaction List <business-transaction@lists.oasis-open.org>
- Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 20:15:59 +0000
Title: Message
Bob Haugen of ebXML and UN/CEFACT
Business Process work groups and Tony Fletcher (Choreology) of same plus
OASIS-Business Transaction Protocol committee wish to announce a
jointly-authored paper entitled "Multi-Party Electronic Business Transactions"
available from (US letter page size): http://www.supplychainlinks.com/UNCEFACT-papers.htmor (A4 page size) http://www.choreology.com/downloads/library.htmlThe paper shows how the thinking that went into BTP can
influence other standards that have come at the need for transactions from a
different angle, and how the Business
Transaction protocol itself can be used as an 'underlay' for application
protocols, even when not initially considered.
The paper is relevant to
discussions about business process coordination, transactions, choreography,
convergence of competing business process standards, and how to handle complex
multi-party business scenarios.
One goal of our
collaboration was to see how much we could harmonize the workings of the
developing UN/CEFACT Business Collaboration Protocol (BCP) and the OASIS
Business Transaction Protocol (BTP).
We found that the two protocols had
enough in common so that BTP-compliant software would be able to implement the
business collaboration/transaction patterns required by the UMM and which are
part of the current Business Collaboration Protocol effort."
UN/CEFACT-BCP was derived from RosettaNet and is the metamodel behind ebXML-BPSS. And BTP participants have been working
on convergence between BTP and WS-T. (E.g. other papers on the Choreology URL
above.) So observant readers can see
evidence that all of these specifications
can be harmonized.
For example, comparing BCP and BTP, we found that each specification brought something different to the views of the
elephant, and then they had some
overlap. BCP focuses on business semantics
and coordination, while BTP focuses on
transaction completion and recovery. They
overlap some on transactions.
Another of our findings was that the multi-party
business scenario we considered required only pair-wise interaction. It did
not require any third-party knowledge of these pair-wise
interactions. Yes, multiple parties were involved in the whole
scenario, but they interacted in pairs, and all coordination between dependent
commitments was the internal and private
responsibility of only one party.
The paper lists several reasons
why many parties will want to separate into pairs:
* Simplicity - two is much
simpler to handle than more-than-two.
* Accountability - business contracts
may involve many parties, but well-formed contracts always specify exactly who
has agreed to do exactly what for exactly whom (i.e., only two parties to each
contractual commitment).
* The more parties to a contract, the more parties
have to agree on everything. (And agreements about transaction rules are
contracts.)
* Economic commitments and events involve two and only two
parties.
* Security - need-to-know. Trading partners need to know about
each other, but they rarely need to know what other partners each may have, and
in many cases should not know even that others exist.
* Decoupling to avoid
ripples of change - if parties A and B change their procedures, it may not
affect parties C and D, unless all four parties are bound into the same
contract.
For more fun, read the paper.
Comments of all kinds
sincerely welcomed.
With best regards from Bob Haugen and Tony
Fletcher
|
Tony
Fletcher
Technical
Advisor
Choreology
Ltd. 13, Austin Friars, London EC2N 2JX UK |
Phone:
|
+44
(0) 20 7670 1787 |
Mobile:
|
+44
(0) 7801 948 219 |
Fax:
|
+44
(0) 20 7670 1785 |
Web: |
www.choreology.com |
Cohesions
1.0™ |
Business
transaction management software for application
coordination |
Work: tony.fletcher@choreology.com
|
Home:
amfletcher@iee.org |
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