A Conversation-oriented language for B2B integration based on Semantic Web Services

Establishing conversations in a B2B environment has significantly eased since the advent of standards such as RosettaNet and ebXML. These standardisation efforts have maintained some flexibility in defining interactions among business partners to allow companies with different internal processes to comply with them. However, the standards are syntactic, rather than semantic. Constraints on the interactions are currently represented informally, if at all. If two business partners want to communicate they still have to find out if the overall constraint set is fulfilled by the other respective business partner. To define this global interaction in the context of a conversation we introduce a formally de- scribed language, called L3. This language grounds on well- defined execution semantics and incorporates a history of the conversation. In our approach, we show how the language allows business partners to define their constraints on the interaction from a global perspective, how certain properties of the conversation may be formally checked, such as deadlock-freedom and how it builds on an architecture based on Semantic Web Services.