Generic Approach to Business Document Modelling

The diploma thesis at hand proposes a graphical modelling methodology for business documents. This methodology is based on the Core Component Technical Speci�cation (CCTS) and located on a high semantic level, independent of the syntax-representation of a particular standard. Business documents are composed of semantic building blocks. Generic templates of building blocks, called Core Components (CCs), make up templates of business documents. Speci �c variants of CCs are called Business Information Entities (BIEs) and make up variants of these business documents. The presented mechanisms for variant handling and extensibility allow a high degree of reusability of these building blocks. They can be reused by multiple business documents and dfferent business document standards. The diploma thesis at hand also examines application components, which support the business document modeller and hide the complexity and constraints of business document modelling. The combination of a simple but comprehensive modelling methodology and practical application components allows even non-experts to participate in the speci�cation of business data. The generic modelling methodology that is implemented in form of a modelling environment accompanying this diploma thesis, allows to model business data for different business document standards such as UBL and RosettaNet. The diploma thesis elaborates how this can be realised and the inherent limitations. Furthermore, the adoption of the CCTS template-variant approach allows to identify common parts of different business documents. This simpli�es mappings between different standards because the semantic of every syntaxrepresentation of a business document is speci�ed by the generic template. It does not solve the general problem of data integration but is a step towards the support for different standards by a common modelling methodology.