From Business Model to Process Pattern in e-commerce

The basic notions in e-commerce are communicative, institutional, and deontic notions such as obligation, responsibility, and trust. The Language Action approach, therefore, seems to be a most promising framework for designing e-commerce systems. However, the penetration of the Language Action approach in industrial practice is still limited. We discuss some reasons for this state of affairs by identifying a number of problems that hinder an effective application of the Language Action approach. We propose modelling techniques and methodological guidelines that can contribute to the solution of these problems. These techniques and guidelines are based on three building blocks: a business model describing the values exchanged in an e-commerce process, a formal and executable language based on communicating state machines, and an automated designer’s assistant that guides a user from a business model to an executable process model. The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage. Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling (LAP 2001) Montreal, Canada, July 21-22, 2001 (M. Schoop, J. Taylor, eds.) http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/conf/lap2001/ P. Jayaweera, P. Johannesson, and P. Wohed 88 The Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling 2001