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Astract: Current business document standards, such as EDIFACT, are defined in an all-embracing manner and, thus, usually include several thousands of elements. This is due to the fact that a standardized document type represents a superset of all data elements required in any industry, in any geopolitical region, etc. Furthermore, standardized document types are defined as stand-alone documents, similar to paper-based documents, comprising all information from previous process steps. In other words, standardization neglects the notion of processes by repeating information in different documents of the same process. In this paper, we propose a methodology for assessing redundancies in business document exchanges and evaluate different real-world industry message implementation guidelines (MIGs) with respect to their efficiency in reducing complexity and redundancies. Insights on redundancies can help companies and standardization committees to improve designs of MIGs and entire EDI standards. Furthermore, one can use the concepts presented in this paper to compare different MIGs with regard to their (dis)similarities, which might be useful when two organizations are to be merged and their IT systems consolidated.

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Astract: Business Process Management (BPM) has gained significant adoption in practice for enabling organizations to increase their effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. This broad adoption has not only been fostered by a rich and wellestablished theory to model, analyze, simulate, and enact business processes, but also by internationally accepted standards and mature technologies. Caused by the ever increasing speed and volatility of markets and the dynamics of new technologies, such as cloud infrastructures and mobile communications, we face a new generation of business processes, which we refer to as living inter-organizational processes. Such processes are not in control of one single organization; instead, they are enacted by multiple organizations, where no participating party possesses full control over the entire process. Such processes often involve a high number of actors that might even be unknown in advance. These actors require various degrees in participation, they are acting in heterogeneous environments. Moreover, such processes are often weakly structured or designed in an ad-hoc manner, and have to be continuously subject to evolution. Unfortunately, existing theories, methodologies, and technologies cannot cope with this challenging combination of aspects, which all have to be considered when dealing with living inter-organizational processes. The state of the art typically addresses singular aspects in isolation. However, a holistic approach to these challenges bears a tremendous potential. This paper aims to contribute towards a holistic approach to living inter-organizational processes. To this end, we describe different perspectives on inter-organizational processes and identify challenges for making them living processes.

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Astract: One and the same inter-organizational business process - such as e-procurement - may be executed differently in different industries, geopolitical regions, etc. Thus, a standardized reference model for inter-organizational business process must be customized to the specific business context (industry, region, etc.). In order to share, search, and (partially) re-use context specific adaptations it is essential not only to store the adaptations, but also a business context model where these adaptations are valid. Therefore, we present our ontology based business context model and explain how it can be applied to generic models of semantically interoperable data blocks, so-called Core Components. Core Components are standardized by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT), and their adaptations are exchanged between business partners in the course of inter-organizational business processes. If we could assign a business context to a business process, we could prevent negative trends in today's business, such as interoperability issues, inconsistencies and heterogeneous interpretations of the interchanged electronic business documents.

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Astract: Today, business processes are modeled without taking into deeper consideration the context of the business environment where they will be later executed. As a consequence, initiation, management and delayed adjustments of business processes are demanding, time-consuming and very often impossible tasks. In this paper we summarize crucial advantages and disadvantages of different Context modeling approaches, and we define the Context related to the scope of the business environment particularly. If we could assign a Business Context to a business process, we could undermine negative trends in today's business, such as interoperability issues, inconsistencies and heterogeneous interpretations of different business processes.

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Astract: Business document standards usually cover a hierarchical structure of thousands of elements that may be relevant in any business context (any industry, any geopolitical region, etc.). In order to use a business document standard in a specific context, user groups define so-called implementation guidelines based on a subset consisting usually of 3-5% of the overall elements. When one defines a new implementation guideline for a specific context, one has always to start from scratch, which is time-consuming and also leads to heterogeneous interpretations of the standard. It is our goal to speed up the development process and to create more homogeneous implementation guidelines by learning from existing models. In the previous phases of our research we have developed the Enhanced Unified Context (E-UCM) model to represent business context. If we could assign instances of this model to already existing business document implementation guidelines, we may guess the subset of a new implementation guideline for a required BC. Accordingly, this paper describes our approach to calculate the content model (subset) of a message implementation guideline which is relevant in a required BC presented by the E-UCM context model.

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Astract: Business document types exchanged between business partners significantly differ among different industries and geopolitical regions. Therefore, the corresponding documents must be based on business document standards which can be adapted to any business context specific business scenario. In order to use a business document standard in a specific context, user groups develop so-called implementation guidelines based on a small subset of the standard. However, defining a new implementation guideline for a specific business context always starts from scratch, which is time-consuming and often leads to heterogeneous interpretations of the standard. It is our goal to speed up this development process and to create more homogeneous implementation guidelines by learning from existing models. Therefore, in this paper we define an ontology based model to formally represent business context. Furthermore, we propose an approach to assign instances of this model to already existing document implementation guidelines. This serves as a basis for calculation of the content model (subset) of a new implementation guideline which is relevant in a particular context presented by our ontology based business context model.

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Astract: One and the same inter-organizational business process - such as e-procurement - may be executed differently in different industries, geopolitical regions, etc. Thus, a standardized reference model for inter-organizational business processes must be customized to the specific business context (industry, region, etc.). In order to share, search, and (partially) re-use context specific adaptations it is essential not only to store the adaptations, but also a business context model where these adaptations are valid. In this paper we describe the Unified Context Model (UCM) introduced by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT). We explain the shortcomings of the approach and show how these can be undermined by our Enhanced Unified Context Model (E-UCM). The enhanced model serves as a basis for contextualizing business documents which are exchanged between different inter-organizational business processes. Having such an approach at hand, helps prevent negative trends in today's business, such as interoperability issues, inconsistencies and heterogeneous interpretations of the exchanged data contents.

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Astract: The reliable, efficient and seamless exchange of business information is essential for a successful execution of the interwoven business processes. However, development of the contents for electronic data exchange is time consuming and usually can not follow the agile demands of the today's business. If we could contextualize the pieces of the currently valid business information, we could predict its possible context specific variations. Therefore, the business contextual knowledge in which the already existing data contents are valid could be exploited to (semi-) automatically generate new, more homogeneous contents for electronic data interchange.

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Astract: In model-driven engineering (MDE), models constitute the main development artifacts. As a consequence, their quality significantly affects the quality of the final product. Thus, adequate techniques are required for ensuring the quality of models. We present a testing framework, comprising a test specification language and an interpreter, for validating the functional correctness of UML activities. For this purpose, we utilize the executability of a subset of UML provided by the fUML standard. As UML activities are employed for different purposes, from high-level process specifications to low-level object manipulations, the proposed testing framework not only allows to validate the correctness in terms of input/output relations, but also supports testing intermediate results, as well as the execution order of activity nodes. First experiments indicate that the proposed testing framework is useful for ensuring the correct behavior of fUML activities.