Deriving Business Service Interfaces in Windows Workflow from UMM Transactions

Modeling inter-organizational business processes identifies the services each business partner has to provide and to consume as well as the flow of interactions between them. A model-driven approach to inter-organizational business processes allows abstracting from the underlying IT platform and, thereby, guarantees to survive changes in technology. UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology (UMM), which is defined as a UML profile, is currently one of the most promising approaches for modeling platform-independent business collaborations. However, well defined mappings to most of the current state-of-the-art candidate platforms are still missing. A candidate platform of growing interest is the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In this paper, we outline a mapping from the basic UMM building blocks, i.e. business transactions, to business service interfaces (BSI) implemented in WF.