Group overview

Business Process Working Group (BPWG)

  • UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology (UMM)
    The UMM Base- and Foundation Modules define a modelling language for inter-organizational business processes and the resulting information exchanges between organizations based on the Unified Modelling Language (UML). Further information can be found in the project area.
  • Resource Event Agent Specification (REA)
    An ontology is a list of the possible categories in a specific domain and the relationships among those categories.  An enterprise ontology explains the types entities or classes you would expect to see in a specific business process.  Example BP classes might include entities like this: order, shipment, invoice, payment, buyer, seller, role, location, goods, services, etc. Enterprise ontologies also explain the classes needed to integrate with internal (ERP) business services.


    REA (resource-event-agent) is an enterprise ontology adopted from the ISO Open-edi series of specifications, most specifically ISO/IEC FDIS 15944-4. Information Technology-Business Operational View — Part 4: Business TransactionScenarios — Accounting and Economic Ontology (February 2007).

    - an ontology-based methodology for developing activity diagrams and collections of shared business entity state machines necessary for orchestrating the business activities within the Business Process View of the UMM Business Requirements View.

    The UMM guidance provided in this specialization module is informative or non-normative, aimed at providing assistance to potential UMM clients in adapting their own semantic models to the UMM.  Later extensions of this project may attempt to provide more integrated guidance within the UMM 2.0 project.

    The goal of this specialization module is to provide two types of specific guidance to UMM users as they develop their collaboration models:

    - an ontology-based methodology for developing the class diagrams and state machine life cycles for business entities within the Business Entity View of the UMM Business Requirements View.

Core Components Working Group (CCWG)

  • Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS)
    The Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) describes and specifies a new approach to the well-understood problem of the lack of information interoperability between applications in the e-business arena. Traditionally, standards for the exchange of business data have been focused on static message definitions that have not enabled a sufficient degree of interoperability or flexibility. The CCTS presents a methodology for developing a common set of semantic building blocks that represent the general types of business data in use today and provides for the creation of new business vocabularies and restructuring of existing business vocabularies. Further information can be found in the project area.
  • Core Components Message Assembly (CCMA)
    The specification will provide a specific methodology for assembling higher level Business Information Entities for electronic messages in a semantic and reusable order, but messages which are not electronic may eventually be built from this specification.  This methodology also includes the definition of templates for similar structuring of all types of business messages. This is one of the key features for high reusability of business messages and getting a common understanding of business messages on a semantic level.
    The technical specification will focus on the business section of a message, and will not include any enveloping needed to transmit this information.  It will include models as appropriate and will fit into the same architecture as UN/CEFACT Business Process specifications.  The business message will be a Business Information Entity (BIE) which is based on an appropriate business message template and no corresponding Aggregate Core Component (ACC) will be required.
  • UML Profile for Core Components (UPCC)
    Accordingly the UPCC specification will be written as a UML and XMI profiles that is implementable by the widest spectrum of UML tool vendors. UPCC has two main tasks in scope:


    Model Validation – To define a standard mechanism to validate the syntax and semantics of UMM models during model development. This provides a means for business analysts to create CCTS compliant UML based models.

    Model Interchange – To define a standard serialization format for CCTS models that can be used both for model interchange between modeling tools and also as an intermediate format for the generation of deployment schema such as XMLNDR for CCTS.

  • Unified Context Methodology (UCM)
    The purpose of the Unified Context Methodology (UCM) Project is to develop a unified methodology and technical specification for developing, registering, and using context drivers as part and for the application of a number of UN/CEFACT standard artefacts, such as Business Data Type, Business Information Entity, Business Message, Business Area, Business Process Models etc. This project will start from the current context mechanism described in the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS).

Electronic Business Architecture Working Group (EBAWG)