From e3-value to REA: Modeling Multi-party E-business Collaborations

In order to open-up enterprise applications to e-business and make them profitable for a communication with other enterprise applications, a business model is needed showing the business essentials of the e-commerce business case to be developed. Currently there are two major business modeling techniques - e3-value and REA (Resource-Event-Agent). Whereas e3-value was designed for modeling value exchanges within an e-business network of multiple business partners, the REA ontology assumes that, in the presence of money and available prices, all multi-party collaborations may be decomposed into a set of corresponding binary collaborations. This paper is a preliminary attempt to view e3-value and REA used side-by-side to see where they can complement each other in coordinated use in the context of multiple-partner collaboration. A real life scenario from the print media domain has been taken to proof our approach.