Members Approve OASIS ebXML Business Process as OASIS Standard

Business Wire, Jan 16, 2007

Axway, Dell, Fujitsu, Sun Microsystems, and Others Collaborate to Advance Royalty-Free Standard for e-Business Collaboration

BOSTON -- OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (ebXML BPSS or ebBP) version 2.0.4 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. ebXML BPSS defines a business process foundation that promotes the automation and predictable exchange of business collaboration definitions using XML.

ebBP supports robust business process methods as part of an collaborative processes among business partners using business transactions in the eBusiness domain or between collaborating parties. The ebBP design is based on the actual needs of eBusiness users around the globe--many of whom provided domain expertise and business requirements to the OASIS Technical Committee. Collaborations supported by ebBP are easily manageable and fully traceable.

"ebBP defines an open-architecture for a collaborative business process module that's freely available and compatible with the 2.0 suite of ebXML OASIS Standards (ISO 15000) and many rules, notations, Web services, EDI, BPMN, and other prevalent specifications and systems," said Monica Martin of Sun Microsystems, co-chair of the OASIS ebXML Business Process Technical Committee. "ebBP is royalty-free and infrastructure agnostic."

The ebBP is part of the ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language) suite of specifications. The original ebXML project was initiated in 1999 by OASIS and the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT), in an effort to enable enterprises of any size and in any location to conduct business over the Internet. In addition to business processes, the original framework defined four layers of substantive data specifications, including standards for core data components, collaboration protocol agreements, messaging, and registries and repositories. Five other ebXML specifications, including four OASIS Standards and one UN/CEFACT recommendation,were approved by ISO in 2004. Today, these specifications, including the ebBP, work effectively with and have been integrated to use other emerging technology specifications to meet evolving eBusiness requirements.

"In BPSS version 1.0, we laid the groundwork for multi-party collaborations, but at that time, contractual obligations, security and identity, and implementations requirements were only partially understood. Since then, the industry's appreciation of how business collaborations can be implemented electronically has increased dramatically," noted Dale Moberg of Axway, co-chair of the OASIS ebXML Business Process Technical Committee. "ebBP stands today as the most advanced business standard in the industry in developing business collaborations such as multi-party."

"In keeping with the goals of the original ebXML project, ebBP remains free and openly available for all to use. It is vendor- and geography-neutral," noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "The ebBP OASIS Standard provides the bridge between eBusiness process modeling and the execution of eBusiness software components."

Axway, the ENEA Italian State research organization, and Fujitsu all verified successful implementations of ebBP. An open source editor, freebxmlbp, has been developed by the Middle East Technical University (METU).

"The ebBP OASIS Standard is a powerful tool for enabling the typical European large networks of small and medium enterprises to formalize a common model of business collaboration in a more efficient and transparent way," said Cristiano Novelli, researcher at Italy's ENEA. The agency, which focuses on new technology, energy and the environment, plans to foster the adoption of ebBP in activities related to technology transfer and innovation in the local industrial districts of Italy.

Participation in the OASIS ebXML Business Process Technical Committee remains open to new or existing OASIS members. OASIS hosts an open mail list for public comment and the ebxml-dev mailing list for exchanging information on implementing the standard.

Support for ebBP

Axway

"The business process models of ebXML have a distinctive abstraction level that promotes neutral specifications of business collaboration logic, whatever implementation approach is used in collaboration plumbing. The result is that industry end users can distribute ebBP business process models and preserve their investment, whether their communities use basic file exchange, messaging, and/or SOAP-based implementation architectures. In addition to expressing the basic data exchange contracts, ebBP allows analysts and end users to specify specific quality of service contracts covering reliability, security, and expected exception notifications or positive acknowledgements. ebXML choreographies can be combined with any internal integration technology or internal business activity description," said Dave Bennett, CTO, Axway.