scope:

The objective of Workgroup 1 of the BII workshop is to: provide specification of message content and business processes that facilitates business interoperability interfaces related to pan-European electronic transactions in public procurement. To facilitate implementation of electronic commerce in a standardized way, thereby enabling the development of standardized software solutions as well as efficient connections between trading partners without case-by-case specification of the data interchange, the workshop agreed to document the required business interoperability interfaces as profile descriptions. The end goal is to reduce the cost of implementing electronic commerce to a level that is economical for small and medium size companies and institutions. A profile description is a technical specification describing - the choreography of the business process(es) covered, i.e. a detailed description of the way the business partners collaborate to play their respective roles and share responsibilities to achieve mutually agreed goals with the support of their respective information systems, - the electronic business transactions exchanged as part of the business process and the sequence in which these transactions are exchanged, - the business rules governing the execution of that business process(es), its business collaborations and business transactions, as well as any constraints on information elements used in the transaction data models - the information content of the electronic business transactions exchanged by pointing to a given data model for each of the business transactions. As well as determining what business transactions are used, the profile restricts their content in terms of elements and the cardinality of elements. The key standardization aspect of the profile description is thus on the organisational and semantics interoperability levels rather than on syntax within the technical interoperability level.