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Astract: Due to company mergers, acquisition and business to business interoperability, there is a need for model transformations in the area of business process modeling to facilitate scenarios like model translation, integration and synchronization. Thus this paper concentrates on transformations of models between different business process modeling languages. As current transformation languages provide general solutions and do not support the special properties of business process models, it is still a challenge defining such transformations. To tackle this problem we introduce the model morphing approach. Our main idea is to create an integrated metamodel containing all concepts of the languages of a given domain. Based on this integration the model transformation can be defined in terms of morphing steps. Our approach is demonstrated by model transformation in the area of business process modeling but is generally suitable for domains in which a variety of languages is used that express similar concepts.

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Astract: Current model-driven Web Engineering approaches (such as OO-H, UWE or WebML) provide a set of methods and supporting tools for a systematic design and development of Web applications. Each method addresses different concerns using separate models (content, navigation, presentation, business logic, etc.), and provide model compilers that produce most of the logic and Web pages of the application from these models. However, these proposals also have some limitations, especially for exchanging models or representing further modeling concerns, such as architectural styles, technology independence, or distribution. A possible solution to these issues is provided by making model-driven Web Engineering proposals interoperate, being able to complement each other, and to exchange models between the different tools. MDWEnet is a recent initiative started by a small group of researchers working on model-driven Web Engineering (MDWE). Its goal is to improve current practices and tools for the model-driven development of Web applications for better interoperability. The proposal is based on the strengths of current model-driven Web Engineering methods, and the existing experience and knowledge in the field. This paper presents the background, motivation, scope, and objectives of MDWEnet. Furthermore, it reports on the MDWEnet results and achievements so far, and its future plan of actions.

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Astract: The definition of modeling languages is a key-prerequisite for model-driven engineering (MDE). In this respect, domain-specific languages (DSL) defined in terms of metamodels and UML profiles are often considered as two alternatives. For interoperability reasons, however, the need arises to bridge modeling languages originally defined as DSLs to UML profiles by defining (1) a specific UML profile to represent the domain-specific modeling concepts in UML and (2) model transformations for transforming DSL models to UML models and vice versa. A manual definition of a UML profile typically is a tedious and errorprone task, but contains a high potential for automation. The contribution of this paper is to integrate the so far competing worlds of DSLs and UML. We report on our semi-automatic approach based on the manual mapping of domain-specific metamodels and UML using a dedicated bridging language as well as the automatic generation of UML profiles and model transformations. We present our ideas within a case study for bridging ComputerAssociate´s DSL of the AllFusion Gen CASE tool with IBM´s Rational Software Modeler for UML.

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Astract: In a B2B environment business partners interact with each other by exchanging electronic business documents. The agreements and commitments between the partner require a certain order in the flow of business documents. This flow - commonly known as choreography - often depends on the actual content of a business document. E.g. the next step depends on whether a price was stated in a quote document or not in the step before. These characteristics usually affect the states of a business entity - whether a quote is in state provided or in state refused. The states of a business entity usually define the next steps in the choreography of a collaborative business process. Thus, it is important that the actual business document content and resulting business entity states are unambiguously defined in a global choreography. In this paper we show how the modeling of business entity state centric choreographies may be incorporated into UN/CEFACT´s modeling methodology (UMM) - one of the best known approaches to model global choreographies.

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Astract: UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology (UMM) is a UML profile for modeling global B2B choreographies. The basic building blocks of UMM are business transactions, which describe the exchange of a business document and an optional response. In addition to these business document exchanges, UMM business transactions mandate business signals that acknowledge the correctness of business documents. It is expected that a business service interface (BSI) on each business partner's side reacts on incoming messages and on messages expected but not received. However the internal orchestration of the BSI is open to interpretations. In this paper we demonstrate an unambiguous mapping from global choreographies described by UMM transactions to a BPEL-based orchestration of the business service interface. It becomes obvious that rather simple looking UMM transactions lead to a more complex message exchange mechanism when implemented on top of Web Services.

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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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