A Data-driven Approach to Internet-based Business Collaboration

Traditional business process modeling approaches focus on the activities, data flows are an afterthought. Concerning cross-organizational collaboration on the Internet, data flow is still far from optimal, causing resource contention and unnecessary data exchanges. In this paper, a data-driven approach to Internet based business collaboration is proposed, which treats data as a centerpiece as data objects and associates activities with the data objects. The data objects hold information structures pertinent to global context to support logic data flow, both the resource contention and data exchanges can be alleviated. A case study shows that the approach works efficiently.