Classification and Verification of Semantic Constraints in ebXML BPSS

The ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language) Specification Schema is to provide nominal set of specification elements necessary to specify a collaboration between business partners based on XML. As a part of ebXML Specification Schema, BPSS (Business Process Specification Schema) has been provided to support the direct specification of the set of elements required to configure a runtime system in order to execute a set of ebXML business transactions. The BPSS is available in two stand-alone representations, a UML version and an XML version. Due to the limitations of UML notations and XML syntax, however, current ebXML BPSS specification is insufficient to specify formal semantic constraints of modeling elements completely. In this study, we propose a classification schema for the BPSS semantic constraints and describe how to represent those semantic constraints formally using OCL (Object Constraint Language). As a way to verify a Business Process Specification (BPS) with the formal semantic constraint modeling, we suggest a rule-based approach to represent the formal constraints and to use the rule-based constraints specification to verify BPSs in a CLIPS prototype implementation.