B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

148 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
B2B collaboration protocols such as RosettaNet, BizTalk and ebXML,
as well as technology integration standards, including J2EE and SOAR
Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) is leading an effort
to develop a universal language for modeling, deployment and execution
of business processes. There are two major direct competitors of BPMI:
XLANG process specification language, a Microsoft initiative, and Web
Services Flow Language (WSFL), an IBM initiative.
Note: Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) is discussed in the chapter
on Web services.
5.4.1. Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI)
The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) is led by several
leading companies including: Hewlett-Packard Co., Art Technology
Group, Sun Microsystems Inc., Tibco Software Inc., Computer Science
Corporation, Cyclone Commerce, DataChannel, Entricom, Ontology.org,
SI Corporation, Versata, VerticalNet and Verve. BPMI.org is developing
the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) and Business Process
Query Language (BPQL).
Business Process Modeling Language (BPML)
BPML is an XML-based, open standard, meta language for the design,
definition, deployment and management of business processes that span
multiple applications, corporate departments and business partners. BPML
is actually an XML schema that provides a standard way to model
mission-critical business processes. It aims to allow tighter integration
and collaboration in business processes than the current application
interface model. BPML is to BPM as XML is to e-commerce.
BPML, like any other business process standard such as ebXML,
RosettaNet, is based on a message-based model. In message-based
models, the participants involved in a business process interact through
the exchange of messages. The business process determines the manner
of the message flows and the information contained within them. The
semantic and syntactic structure of messages is defined using BPML
XML schema.