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Astract: The Web Services Transaction protocol family includes the WS-AtomicTransaction and the WSBusinessActivity specifications in order to carry out distributed transactions in a Web Services (WS) environment. The WS-AtomicTransaction specification defines all necessary interfaces to carry out transactional work. In contrary, the WS-BusinessActivity specification for long-running transactions intentionally left the interface between initiator and coordinator undefined. This allows vendors to integrate WS-BusinessActivity coordinators into their business process engines. However, it requires proprietary protocols between initiator and coordinator. We propose an extension protocol to the WS-BusinessActivity specification that explicitly defines this interface between initiator and coordinator. This extension allows coordinators and initiators from different vendors to interoperate transparently. Accordingly, participants no longer need to trust an initiator-selected and likely initiator-run coordination service, but may use commonly trusted, third-party coordination services.

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Astract: In the development process of a B2B system it is crucial that the business experts are able to express and evaluate agreements and commitments between the partners and that the software engineers get all necessary information to bind the private process interfaces to the public ones. UN/CEFACT's modeling methodology (UMM) is a UML profile for developing B2B processes. The formalisms introduced by UMM's stereotypes facilitate the communication with the software engineers. However, business experts - who usually have a very limited understanding of UML - prefer expressing their thoughts and evaluating the results by plain text descriptions. In this paper we describe an approach that presents an equivalent of the UMM stereotypes and tagged values in text-based templates called worksheets. This strong alignment allows an integration into a UMM modeling tool and ensures consistency. We show how a specially designed XML-based worksheet definition language allows customization to special needs of certain business domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate how information kept in worksheets may be used for the semi-automatic generation of pattern-based UMM artifacts.

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Astract: The tighter coupling of enterprises in regard to information system technology has also changed the way business processes are modeled. Modeling interorganizational business processes is necessary in order to gain a profound and unique representation of the processes involved. However this requires a new methodology especially designed for modeling inter-organizational business processes. The United Nation´s Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) took up the challenge and started to develop such a methodology. The research efforts became known as UN/CEFACT´s modeling methodology (UMM) [1]. UMM enables the business modeler to capture the business knowledge independent of the underlying implementation technology such as ebXML or Web Services. Due to the popularity of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) the UMM is built on top of it. UMM is defined as a UML profile - i.e. a set of stereotypes, tagged values and constraints - in order to customize the UML meta model for the specific purpose of modeling the collaborative space in B2B. Although the standard is well developed and documented, its complexity and mightiness make it difficult for the novice user to perceive from scratch. Therefore a tool, supporting themodeler in creating a validUMMmodel would help those inexperienced with UMM.We have developed such a plug-in for the UML modeling tool Enterprise Architect 1 called UMM Add-In 2.We highlight the main features of the Add-In and show how the tool facilitates the use of the methodology.

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