Multi-party Collaboration

In 2002 a long argument/discussion took place between Bob Haugen , who was then working on business process patterns for UN/CEFACT, related to the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS), and Tony Fletcher , who was championing the OASIS Business Transaction Protocol (BTP) for Choreology.

There was a happy ending: Tony won the argument, and Bob went to work for Choreology!

During their discussion, they found that:

• They could implement the UN/CEFACT-BPSS Business Transaction pattern with BTP with better reliability and recovery qualities

• If they wanted to do multi-party collaborations with transactional qualities in BPSS, they needed to borrow some ideas from BTP, for example, coordinators

The white paper on Multi-party electronic business transactions, originally presented at the UN/CEFACT meeting in December 2002, documents their design experiments and findings in detail. This paper has become one of the most frequently accessed papers on Choreology’s web site.

When presenting the paper at the UN/CEFACT meeting, Bob and Tony learned that a major on-line retailer uses something a lot like one of their designs, which means a pattern is emerging.