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

UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology (UMM) is a modelingapproach for describing the choreography of B2B processes.UMM is developed by the United Nations Centerfor 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. Aswe learned, using UML as the underlying notation forUMM results in several shortcomings. Furthermore, someworkarounds are required to fit the concepts of UMM tothe UML meta model. Thus, in this paper we examine analternative notation for UMM following the concepts of adomain-specific language (DSL). The contribution of thispaper is twofold: (i) we identify general concepts for modelingglobal choreographies by taking UMM as a startingpoint. (ii) We introduce the Business Choreography Language(BCL), a domain-specific language designed to efficientlysupport the prior identified concepts. The conceptsof the BCL are exemplified by an implementation using theMicrosoft DSL Tools for Visual Studio. In fact, the BCL isan approach tailored to support the specific needs of globalB2B choreographies.