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Astract: The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and eBusiness UN/CEFACT) standardizes business documents for electronic data interchange. Their approaches towards UN/EDIFACT and XML have later been followed by a conceptual modeling approach called Core components (CC). Having used this approach for four years in practice, it became evident that the support for managing business document models is a prerequisite for successfully utilizing CC. This includes handling variants of business document models on the one hand, and managing the evolution of business document models on the other hand. In this paper we propose an approach to face these challenges by the means of Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) in combination with dedicated model management operators. The contribution of the approach is twofold. First, SPLE is successfully applied in a new field enabling us to manage variants of business document models. Second, the model management operators support the evolution of business document model variants, whereas the operators defined, contribute to the evolution of product lines as well.

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Astract: Exchanging structured business documents is inevitable for successful collaboration in electronic commerce. A prerequisite, for fostering the interoperability between business partners utilizing different business document standards, is a mapping between different standards. However, the effort involved in creating those mappings is hard to estimate. For example, the complexity of standardized formats is one crucial aspect affecting the effort of the mapping process. Therefore, a notion of complexity is desirable for both, manual as well as automatic mapping processes. For this reason we develop an initial set of metrics, based on well established metrics for XML Schema, allowing to analyze the complexity of business document standards. Having such metrics at hand allows estimating the complexity and hence the mapping effort of a business document standard, prior to the actual mapping process. We demonstrate the complexity metrics on three different business document standards from the electronic commerce domain.

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Astract: Software engineering deals with the development of complex software systems which is an inherently team-based task. Therefore, version control support is needed to coordinate the teamwork and to manage parallel modifications. If conflicting modifications occur, in standard approaches the developer who detected the conflict is responsible for the conflict resolution alone and has to resolve the conflict immediately. Especially in early project phases, when software models are typically employed for brainstorming, analysis, and design purposes, such an approach bears the danger of losing important viewpoints of different stakeholders and domain engineers, resulting in a lower quality of the overall system specification. In this paper, we propose conflict-tolerant model versioning to overcome this problem. Conflicts are marked during the merge phase and are tolerated temporarily in order to resolve them later in a collaborative setting. We illustrate the proposed approach for the standardized modeling language UML and discuss how it can be integrated in current modeling tools and version control systems.

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Astract: In our project BSopt we have developed a model-driven approach towards inter-organizational systems. During its evaluation phase we recognized that different partner networks operate similar, but still slightly differ in some details. However, our current approach is limited with respect to re-use of models or parts thereof for different partner networks. Thus, we plan to incorporate well established design techniques from reference modeling into our approach leading to inter-organizational reference models. We believe that inter-organizational reference models will speed up the development and will improve the quality of inter-organizational systems. In this position paper we outline our plans of integrating the design techniques of reference modeling into inter-organizational system development even if we do not provide a solution yet.

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Astract: The urgent demand for optimistic version control support for software models induced active research within the modeling community. Recently, several approaches have been proposed addressing the task of detecting conflicts when merging two concurrently changed versions of a model. In this context, the holistic representation and supportive visualization of detected merge conflicts pose a challenge. In this paper, we present a modeling language independent conflict model comprising all necessary information to profoundly represent merge conflicts. From this conflict model, we leverage the dynamic extension power of UML profi les by introducing a dedicated conflict pro file to visually assist modelers in resolving merge conflicts of UML models. As a result, modelers may resolve conflicts in the concrete graphical syntax conducting their familiar UML editors without tool extensions.

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Astract: A crucial prerequisite for the success of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is the seamless exchange of models between diff erent modeling tools demanding for mappings between tool-specifi c metamodels. Thereby the resolution of heterogeneities between these tool-specifi c metamodels is a ubiquitous problem representing the key challenge. Nevertheless, there is no comprehensive classification of potential heterogeneities available in the domain of MDE. This hinders the specifi cation of a comprehensive benchmark explicating requirements wrt. expressivity of mapping tools, which provide reusable components for resolving these heterogeneities. Therefore, we propose a feature-based classifi cation of heterogeneities, which accordingly adapts and extends existing classifi cations. This feature-based classifi cation builds the basis for a mapping benchmark, thereby providing a comprehensive set of requirements concerning expressivity of dedicated mapping tools. In this paper a rst set of benchmark examples is presented by means of metamodels and conforming models acting as an evaluation suite for mapping tools.

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Astract: The usage of optimistic version control systems comes along with cumbersome and time-consuming conflict resolution in the case that the modifications of two developers are contradicting. For code as well as for any other artifact the resolution support moves hardly beyond the choices "keep mine", "keep theirs", "take all changes", or "abandon all changes". To ease the conflict resolution in the context of model versioning, we propose a recommender system which suggests automatically executable resolution patterns to the developer responsible for the conflict resolution. The lookup algorithm is based on a similarity-aware graph matching approach incorporating information from the metamodel of the used modeling language. This allows not only the retrieval of recommendations exactly matching the given conflict situation, but also the identification of similar conflict situations whose resolution patterns are adaptable to the current conflict.

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Astract: XML has replaced traditional EDI standards in the field of business document standardization. Despite of the syntax, the principal approach to develop business document standards has not changed. A standardized business document is built by a superset of all elements that may appear in any business context, leading to overloaded and complex standards. However, in a particular partnership only a small percentage of the elements is used. This results in a top-down approach starting from a generic document and specifying partner-specific subsets. Such an approach is too costly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), because agreements on subsets must be implemented in their software systems. As an alternative we suggest a bottom-up solution that starts from a core set of elements, representing the intersection of all industry contexts. Thereby, the core set may be extended to incorporate the needs of a specific business context. In this paper we examine different mechanisms provided by XML Schema to realize such an extension. The applicability of the different mechanisms is evaluated by means of the Austrian e-Invoicing standard ebInterface, which we co-authored.

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Astract: Inter-organizational B2B systems are most likely tending to change their business requirements over time - e.g. establishing new partnerships or change existing ones. The problem is that business analysts design the business processes from scratch, disregarding the economic drivers of the business network. We propose to use business modeling techniques - such as REA (Resource-Event-Agents) - to ensure that business processes beneath do not violate the domain rules, i.e. to ful ll the basic economic principle for every business transaction - the give-andtake convention, called economic reciprocity. This helps us to quickly adapt the B2B processes to changing requirements without the need to change the overall architecture. In this paper we provide a mapping from REA, which represents one of the most prominent ontologies for business modeling, to UMM (UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology), a standardized methodology for modeling the global choreography of interorganizational business processes. We formalize the mapping by the use of the model-to-model transformation language ATL (Atlas Transformation Language).