Summary Results of the Business Object Summit (BOS) 2000
Objectives: The development of standards to enable Electronic Business within and among parties requires unambiguous and concise specification of the information and processes required to support the economic activity. It is necessary to achieve a global synthesis of data sharing capabilities that are currently represented in a variety of different standards and specifications.
Business Objects: The Summit accepted that business objects could be defined as:
- representing persons, places, things or concepts in a business domain
- packaging business procedures, policy and constraints around business data
- independent of applications
- sharable across industries
- reusable
Business, application and technology objects can be used for both the business * world and computer environment, and for analysis, design, and software development.
* including government, public administrations and consumers
The Summit has recognised a sequence of potential steps to improve the development of business objects: - Identify and summarize relevant activities (and publish on the BOS web), including:
- Organisation - name and type
- Scopes and levels
- Terms of Reference, Work Programmes/Deliverables
- Relationships
- Contacts
- URL(s) for organisation and information
- (URL of) Relevant acronyms and definitions
- Identify opportunities for the activities to work in harmony
- avoiding conflicts in developments.
- Find ways for the results of particular activities to work together (at least partly computer-to-computer).
- Find ways to use what others have developed.
- Identify a common subset of objects and related mappings between objects and obtain consensus on it ("desired" subset rather than "lowest common denominator", but without blocking progress).
- Identify basic standards acceptable to and usable by all (consensus), upon which all solutions can be built. If necessary, develop them or finish developing them.
- Ideal long term goal: work towards a common solution, a single, flexible solution to cover all needs except what is truly different from industry to industry.
Basic principles: - Public standardisation should (not compete with)( cooperate with?) consortia standardisation solutions
- Parallel work in different organisations will create conflicts in standardisation and should be avoided
- Basic solutions already used but not standardised have to be standardised in order to provide stability for the further definition process
- Basic standards should only be established if
- they are necessary
- consensus can be expected
- they are already or will be widely used
- no dominant concurrent consortia solutions exist
- Domain related solutions should only be standardised if sector specific consensus exists
- Arbitrary differences between sectors should be avoided
- Application related classification is necessary
- Object identification
- Paradigm shift from flat coding to multilevel inheritance coding is necessary
Repository principles: - The development of any repository of business objects should use the "web" approach (loose coupling) rather than the "single registry" approach.
- Need common dictionary of terms
- Key requirements:
- Extensibility of objects
- Identification of schemas
- Definition of attribute types for entries in repositories
- Criteria for inclusion in repository
- Multiple different hierarchies in repository
- Multilingual dictionary
- Support for EXPRESS and UML and their convergence
- Support for multiple representation forms
Complementary activities: - Review of progress
- Review of proposed steps
- Marketing and promotion of vision amongst the participants
- Maintenance of BOS website + listserver
- Future summit on BOS
