A Framework for Modeling B2B Applications

This paper presents a Web services-based framework for modeling business-to-business (B2B) applications. This framework consists of three levels namely strategic, application, and resource, with focus here on the first two levels. The strategic level is about the common vision that independent businesses define as part of their decision to join forces. And the application level is about the business processes that get virtually integrated as result of this common vision. To implement the strategic and application levels, this paper leverages from our earlier two projects referred to as context-aware Web services and coordination model for Web services, respectively. Hence in line with these projects we model B2B applications as context-aware Web services. Context-based modeling is used for modeling and tracking interactions among B2B applications, with emphasis on how conflicts among the applications are identified and managed. The application of our framework to a B2B scenario relies on a case study from the purchasing domain. We also present a prototype implementation of our framework on this domain.