Quality of electronic messaging standards' specifications

Nowadays, electronic messaging standards are often used by business to engage in B2B collaborations. Consequently, a lot of effort is put in the development of specification languages and techniques. Unfortunately, as little attention is given to the quality aspects of specifications, it is unclear what determines a specification's quality. This article answers that question by proposing a framework of the quality factors. It is argued that, besides interchangeable message structures, their meanings, intentions and allowed interactions need to be specified. Furthermore, it is suggested that model based specifications are of high quality since they are implementable through MDA transformations.