Efficient MatchMaking of Business Processes for B2B Process Integration

Web technologies promise to facilitate the growth of both B2B and B2C e-commerce by offering cheaper and flexible ways to do business. Web services in particular have become very popular, with support from both academic and industry researchers. The ebXML framework which is an initiative of UN/CEFACT and OASIS has also taken ground. Many challenges however still remain before both web services and ebXML can be used to their full potential by the business community to do business. One of the open issues is the automated matchmaking of business processes to find compatible business partners. In the web services world, standards exist to model and store business processes in registries like UDDI, but up to now, it is not possible to efficiently match business processes from different partners without using manually negotiated frame contracts like RossettaNet PIPs. In the ebXML framework, potential business partners register their profiles (including business processes) in a collaboration protocol profile (CPP), but so far it is not possible to automatically match CPPs from different partners to create a collaboration protocol agreement (CPA). It is our belief that automated support for matchmaking of business processes is needed, both in the web services and ebXML domains.