Global electronic commerce through ebXML and service oriented architectures

Global electronic commerce has flourished following the commercialisation of the Internet. ebXML is a global business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce standard which addresses not only the formats and vocabularies of electronic business documents exchanged between business partners, but also the choreography of business transactions during a collaborative process. On the other hand, the service-oriented architectures (SOA) together with web services promise a new era for B2B collaboration with dynamically created business partnerships transacting based on published choreographies, for which the ebXML BPSS (Business Process Specification Scheme) is a major specification language. This paper illustrates the approach with a contract negotiation process and identifies some implementation issues.