Modeling business media platforms

The high speed at which new businesses are developed can to a large extent be attributed to their ability to flexibly combine existing services into an integrated business platform. The development of such platforms requires the representation of the business architecture in a model which can be implemented in a software solution. However, aside from diagramming techniques little help is available. Hence, guidelines are needed on how to model the architecture of the prospective business platform which considers the necessity for flexible service combination. The objective of the paper is to present guidelines for modeling business media platforms which are based on both an underlying reference model providing a general architecture and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as descriptive technique.