How could messages/document affect conversations/collaborations ?
According to the fortcomming version 3.0 of BPSS (choreography) there may be collaborations objects being created during conversations, examples are Contract, Commitment, Economic Event, etc. There is also a
mechanism for creating other kinds of BusinessEntities from so called BusinessEntityType’s (BET). These objects may persist throughout a collaboration and subsequently be affected by messages sent between the
requester (speaker) and the responder (hearer).
These effects are currently expressed as business rules and a “state algebra”. However sometimes the complexities of the rules blurs the understanding of the interactions between the “communicative world” (messaging)
and the “institutional world” (REA, BET’s, persistent objects)
One way of clarifying these effects is to treat the messages/propositional content as a set of proposed commands/operations/programs that affect the shared database/knowledge base which is state-synchronized. When
the proposal has been accepted then the propositional content is “executed” on both sides (state-synchronizatin). This way support for transaction may be easily incorporated.
<propose, {contractA = create-object[Contract],
link[in-agreement, partyC, contractA],>
link[in-agreement, partyD, contractA]}
event[“contract-entered”]>
In above Speech Act the speaker proposes to to the hearer to enter a contract (simple example of negotiation pattern).
Of course this can be made more complete by adding context’s and more declarative commands, possibly by using UML ActionSemantics or Functional Grammar etc.
/Anders W. Tell
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