The Business Choreography Language (BCL) - A Domain-Specific Language for Global Choreographies

UN/CEFACT's modeling methodology (UMM) is a modeling approach for describing the choreography of B2B processes. UMM is developed by the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) and currently defined as a UML profile. Thereby, it constrains the UML for the specific needs of B2B. As we learned, using UML as the underlying notation for UMM results in several shortcomings. Furthermore, some workarounds are required to fit the concepts of UMM to the UML meta model. Thus, in this paper we examine an alternative notation for UMM following the concepts of a domain-specific language (DSL). The contribution of this paper is twofold: (i) we identify general concepts for modeling global choreographies by taking UMM as a starting point, (ii) We introduce the business choreography language (BCL), a domain-specific language designed to efficiently support the prior identified concepts. The concepts of the BCL are exemplified by an implementation using the Microsoft DSL Tools for Visual Studio. In fact, the BCL is an approach tailored to support the specific needs of global B2B choreographies.