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Astract: The Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology has its roots in the accounting discipline and was originally developed as a reference framework to conceptualize economic phenomena in an enterprise. In its proposal in 1982, McCarthy already had the vision to facilitate the design of data structures of accounting information systems by means of REA. Since this time the REA model has been further extended and evolved into a domain ontology. All REA concepts are based on well established concepts of the literature in economic theory - which is certainly one of the strengths of REA. However, REA has no dedicated representation format and, consequently, no graphical syntax. Thus, users may struggle when describing the REA models leading to the impression that REA is a rather heavy-weight approach. A dedicated graphical syntax - such as it exists for e3-value - may help in overcoming this problem and may lead to a much more significant adoption of REA. Accordingly, we have started the endeavor of developing a domain specific modeling language for REA.

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Astract: Standardized business documents are a prerequisite for successful information exchange in electronic business transactions. The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and eBusiness (UN/CEFACT) provides a conceptual modeling approach, called Core Components, used by Business Partners (BPs) for defining business document models (BDMs). These BDMs are essential for defining service interfaces in service-oriented systems. However, in such a highly dynamic environment with ever-changing market demands, BPs are confronted with the need to revise their BDMs resulting in new versions of BDMs. Furthermore, BPs may dictate the use of new versions of BDMs. However, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may not always adopt new BDM versions due to the cost and effort involved, inhibiting electronic information exchange. In this paper, we present a framework for dealing with interoperability issues in service-oriented systems through providing BPs with Business Document Interoperability as a Service. Having such a framework at hand provides SMEs with a low-cost and light-weight approach for dealing with evolving market requirements and hence evolving business documents. Furthermore, we present a prototypical implementation as well as an evaluation of the framework proposed.

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Astract: Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is based on the standardization of business document types. Usually, a standard business document type is defined in an all-embracing manner covering all elements needed in any business context, such as geopolitical context, industry context, and others. Before exchanging business documents in a particular business context, business partners have to agree on an implementation guide resulting in a subset of the standard document type. Different subsets of a standard document type may also be considered as variants of the standard document type. Since no agreed methodology for building variants of standard documents types exists, the domain of EDI may learn from Software Engineering. In fact, we are facing the need for managing variants which is typically addressed in Software Configuration Management. In this position paper, we propose utilizing concepts from Product Line Engineering (PLE) for managing variability in business document models. Therefore, we present the challenges encountered in managing variability in business documents. Furthermore, we provide a profound discussion why concepts from PLE are promising for managing business document variants.

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Astract: The United Nations Centre for Trace Facilitation and eBusiness (UN/CEFACT) provides a conceptual approach named Core Components for defining business document types based on generic, reusable building blocks. For facilitating interoperability in Electronic Data Interchange, these reusable building blocks are defined in an all-embracing manner. Accordingly, business partners customize the standard business document types for fitting their needs and requirements, resulting in different business document type variants. However, the approach is missing sufficient mechanisms for managing business document model variants. First, customizing standardized business document types is purely based on a textual specification. Second, the variability present within the Core Component approach lacks an explicit representation. In this paper, we aim at making variability explicit as well as adding a formal aspect to the business document type customization process by employing variability concepts from Product Line Engineering. Furthermore, based on having explicit variability models, business partners are provided with an approach for customizing business document types through configuring variability models.

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Astract: Despite standardization efforts the seamless exchange of business documents often poses a problem, due to a large number of different formats. Also, there may be several standards initiatives in the same business domain, all equally important. Consequently, transformation between various document formats on the instance layer becomes necessary. To ease the implementation of transformers we propose an XSLT-based generation framework that allows for bidirectional transformations. Furthermore, we rely on Core Components as an intermediary format. As a proof of concept we developed a prototype based on the open source tool named VIENNA Add-In.