ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007

INTERNATIONAL ISO
STANDARD 15944-4
First edition
2007-11-01

Information technology — Business
Operational View —
Part 4:
Business transaction scenarios —
Accounting and economic ontology
Technologies de l'information — Vue opérationelle d'affaires —
Partie 4: Scénarios de transactions d'affaires — Ontologie comptable et
économique




Reference number
ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
©
ISO/IEC 2007

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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
Contents Page
Foreword. iv
0 Introduction . v
0.1 Purpose and Overview . v
0.2 Definition of Open-edi Business Transaction Ontology (OeBTO). vi
0.3 Use of the “Independent” and “Trading Partner” Perspective in the Open-edi Ontology
Work . vii
0.4 The “Open-edi Business Transaction Ontology” (OeBTO). viii
0.5 Organization and description of this part of ISO/IEC 15944. ix
1 Scope . 1
2 Normative references . 1
3 Terms and definitions. 1
4 Abbreviated terms . 11
5 The Declarative Component of an OeBTO – Primitive and Derived Data Classes . 11
5.1 Person and Economic Resources. 11
5.2 The Normative Data Categories for a Business Transaction Involving an Economic
Exchange: Resources, Events, and Persons Plus Their Fundamental Relationships. 15
5.2.1 Entity Definitions: . 17
5.2.2 Relationship Definitions: . 17
5.3 Addition of Business Event to Basic Exchange Pattern: . 17
5.4 Extension of the OeBTO into Types . 18
5.5 Locations and Claims. 20
5.6 Adding Commitments to Economic Exchanges. 20
5.7 Business Transactions with Contracts .22
5.8 Typifying Agreements and Business Transactions . 23
6 The Procedural Component of an OeBTO – Business Transaction State Machines . 25
6.1 Relating Ontological Components to the Open-edi Business Transaction Phases. 25
7 The Constraint Component of an OeBTO – Incorporating Business Rules into Business
Transactions. 36
7.1 Business Rules and Open-edi Constraints. 36
7.2 OeBTO Constraint Examples. 37
7.3 Summary. 37
Annex A (normative) Consolidated List of Terms and Definitions with Cultural Adaptability: ISO
English and ISO French Language Equivalency . 39
A.1 Introduction . 39
A.2 ISO English and ISO French . 39
A.3 Cultural adaptability and quality control. 39
A.4 List of Terms in French Alphabetical Order. 40
A.5 Organization of Annex A, “Consolidated matrix of terms and definitions” . 42
A.6 Consolidated Matrix of ISO/IEC 15944-4 Terms and Definitions in English and French. 44
Annex B (informative) REA Model Background . 60
)
B.1 REA (Resource-Event-Agent) Ontology Introduction . 60
B.2 The Basic REA Ontology . 60
B.3 Adding Commitments to the Basic Exchange Ontology. 61
B.4 Adding Types to the Basic REA Exchange Ontology. 62
B.5 The Suitability of the REA Ontology within the Open-edi Model. 63
Annex C (normative) Business Transaction Model (BTM): two classes of constraints . 66
Bibliography . 69
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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
Foreword
ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (the International Electrotechnical
Commission) form the specialized system for worldwide standardization. National bodies that are members of
ISO or IEC participate in the development of International Standards through technical committees
established by the respective organization to deal with particular fields of technical activity. ISO and IEC
technical committees collaborate in fields of mutual interest. Other international organizations, governmental
and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO and IEC, also take part in the work. In the field of information
technology, ISO and IEC have established a joint technical committee, ISO/IEC JTC 1.
International Standards are drafted in accordance with the rules given in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2.
The main task of the joint technical committee is to prepare International Standards. Draft International
Standards adopted by the joint technical committee are circulated to national bodies for voting. Publication as
an International Standard requires approval by at least 75 % of the national bodies casting a vote.
Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent
rights. ISO and IEC shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.
ISO/IEC 15944-4 was prepared by Joint Technical Committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology,
Subcommittee SC 32, Data management and interchange.
ISO/IEC 15944 consists of the following parts, under the general title Information technology — Business
Operational View:
⎯ Part 1: Operational aspects of Open-edi for implementation
⎯ Part 2: Registration of scenarios and their components as business objects
⎯ Part 4: Business transaction scenarios — Accounting and economic ontology
⎯ Part 5: Identification and referencing of requirements of jurisdictional domains as sources of external
constraints
The following part is under preparation:
⎯ Part 6: Technical introduction of eBusiness modeling [Technical Report]
eBusiness vocabulary will form the subject of a future Part 7.
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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
0 Introduction
0.1 Purpose and overview
This work is motivated with important ideas from the ISO Open-edi specifications as represented in
ISO/IEC 15944-1, Information technology — Business agreement semantic descriptive techniques — Part 1:
Operational aspects of Open-edi for implementation. In ISO/IEC 15944-1 and in some of its earlier
foundational expositions, such as ISO/IEC 14662, there were important concepts defined and interrelated
such as business transaction, fundamental activities of a business transaction, commitment, Person, role,
scenario and others. A need for relating all of these concepts in a formal framework for the Open-edi work is
apparent.
This is a question of ontology: a formal specification of the concepts that exist in some domain of interest and
the relationships that hold among them [8]. In this case, the domains of interest are those that encompass
Open-edi activities; that is: law, economics and accounting in an extended sense — not the internal
accounting of one particular firm, but the accountabilities of each of the participants in an external business
transaction.
Ontologies are generally classified as either upper-level ontologies — dealing with generalized phenomena
like time, space and causality — or domain ontologies, dealing with phenomena in a specific field like military
operations, manufacturing, medical practice or business. The economic and accounting ontology being used
in electronic business eXtended Markup Language (ebXML), in the UN/CEFACT modeling methodology, and
E-Commerce Integration Meta-Framework (ECIMF) work is entitled the Resource-Event-Agent Ontology
1)
(REA) . REA is used here as an ontological framework for specifying the concepts and relationships involved
in business transactions and scenarios in the Open-edi sense of those terms. The resulting framework is titled
the Open-edi business transaction ontology (OeBTO).
The REA ontology is actually an elementary set of concepts derived from basic definitions in accounting and
economics. These concepts are illustrated most simply with a UML class diagram. See Figure 1, which
illustrates the simple Resource-Event-Agent structure that gives REA its name. A business transaction or
exchange has two REA constellations joined together, noting that the two parties to a simple market transfer
expect to receive something of value in return when they trade. For example, a seller, who delivers a product
to a buyer, expects a requiting cash payment in return.
from
Person
resource-flow
Economic Economic
(Economic
Resource Event
Agent)
to
duality

Figure 1 — Basic Economic Primitives of the Open-edi Ontology
There are some specific points of synergy between the REA ontology and the ISO Open-edi specifications as
represented in ISO/IEC 15944-1.
ISO/IEC 15944-1:2002, 3.9 defines commitment as “the making or accepting of a right, obligation, liability or
responsibility by a Person.”. Commitment is a central concept in REA. Commitments are promises to
execute future economic events, for example to fulfill an order by executing a delivery event.

1) Elements of the REA ontology as they are used in other standards work are explained in Annex B.
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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
ISO/IEC 15944-1:2002, 6.1.3, Rule 1 states: “Business transactions require both information exchange and
commitment exchange.” REA firmly agrees with and helps give definition to this assertion. Reciprocal
commitments are exchanged in REA via economic contracts that govern exchanges, while information
exchange is tracked via business events that govern the state transitions of business transaction entities that
represent various economic phenomena.
ISO/IEC 15944-1:2002, 6.3.1, Rule 39 states: “Conceptually a business transaction can be considered to be
constructed from a set of fundamental activities. They are planning, identification, negotiation, actualization
and post-actualization.” For REA, actualization is the execution of economic events that fulfill
commitments. Planning and identification involve business partners with types of economic resources, events
and persons, while negotiation is finalized by an economic contract which is a bundle of commitments. The
UN/CEFACT Business Process Group has also defined negotiation protocols that assist in forming
commitments. The Open-edi set of activities and the REA economic concepts will help each other tie together
all the activities into a cohesive business transaction, and then unite that transaction definition with its related
information models.
Finally, with regard to the preliminary agreement between Open-edi and REA, the two major sets of ideas that
characterize the Open-edi work — the specification of Business Transactions and the configuration of
Scenarios — correspond well at the aggregate level to what the REA ontology calls the accountability
infrastructure and the policy infrastructure. A business transaction specifies in a descriptive sense actual
business events what has occurred or has been committed to. Conversely, a scenario is more prescriptive: it
configures what could be or should be. The realm of both descriptions and prescriptions is important to
Open-edi and to REA, and they can work well in developing standards for each.
0.2 Definition of Open-edi Business Transaction Ontology (OeBTO)
According to the most widely accepted definition from Tom Gruber [7], “ontology is a formal, explicit
2)
specification of a shared conceptualization.” The individual components of this meaning are each worth
examining.
⎯ formal = machine-readable;
⎯ explicit specification = concepts, properties, relations, constraints and axioms are explicitly defined;
⎯ of a shared = consensual knowledge;
⎯ conceptualization = abstract model of some phenomenon in the real world.
At present, the REA model is certainly an explicit specification of a shared conceptualization of economic
phenomena in the accounting community. A formal, machine-readable specification is not proposed in this
part of ISO/IEC 15944; however, such extensions may follow in other standards work.
This part of ISO/IEC 15944 focuses on integrating the Gruber definition of ontology with an REA-based
approach. It does so from an accounting and economic ontology perspective within an Open-edi Reference
Model context. This is achieved through the introduction of the concept (or construct) of “Open-edi Business
Transaction Ontology (OeBTO)”, which is defined as follows:
formal, rule-based specification and definition of the concepts pertaining to business transactions and
scenarios and the relationships that hold among those concepts

2) See also the expert contribution by Dr. Jake V. Knoppers in the JTC1/SC32/WG1 document N0220, “Draft Definition
for Open-edi Business Transaction Ontology (OeBTO)”, 2002-05-06.
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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
0.3 Use of the “independent” and “trading partner” perspective in the Open-edi ontology
work
In normal business use, the naming perspective for the ontological primitives would be that of the
entrepreneur or of one of the two trading partners engaged in collaborative commerce. The other trading
partner would ordinarily have a mirror-image view. Thus a sale, a cash receipt or a resource inflow for a
particular entrepreneur would become a purchase, a cash disbursement or a resource outflow for a
corresponding trading partner. From this perspective, business events and their accompanying economic
phenomena would be modeled twice, once in the database of each trading partner. However, for Open-edi
purposes, or for that matter for any other independent modeling of business collaborations like the BRV level
of the UN/CEFACT modeling methodology, this redundancy is not acceptable because it allows the states of
the two representations to become inconsistent. This difference in naming perspective is explained below and
3)
illustrated in Figure 2.
Collaboration Perspective: Trading Partner vs. Independent
Independent view of
Enterprise #1
Inter-enterprise events
Business
Process
Enterprise #2
Business
Business
Process
Process
Business
Business
Process Enterprise #3
Process
Business
Process
Business
Trading Partner view of
Process
Inter-enterprise events
(upstream vendors and
Business
downstream customers)
Process
Business
Dotted arrows represent flow of goods, services, and cash between
Process
different companies; solid arrows represent flows within companies

Figure 2 — Different Views of Business Collaboration

3) Figure 2 was contributed by the Japanese delegation to SC 32, led by Katsuhiro Morita during the Open-edi group
meeting in Victoria in October 2001. (See further, the JTC1/SC32/WG1 document N1 N0190 “AIW15944-4, Information
technology — Business Agreement Descriptive techniques Part 4: Open-edi Ontology”, 2001-10-22.). Some naming
conventions have been added since that first contribution (See further Annex H in document SC32/WG1 N0123).
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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
Figure 2 illustrates three independent value chains for three different enterprises. Each company has a
connected network of business processes that takes its initial input of resources (called factor inputs for their
production functions) and transforms them via cumulative flows of goods, services and cash into an output for
that firm’s downstream customers. For Open-edi collaboration modeling, these internal processes are not
relevant until a resource flow crosses enterprise boundaries, as is illustrated for Enterprise #2 which accepts
materials from Enterprise #1 and which delivers materials to Enterprise #3 (most probably in both cases for
cash payments in return). The two dotted lines with double-headed arrows show these inter-enterprise events.
The independent or collaboration perspective of resource flows is anchored on the view of the eye outside of
Enterprise #2. This view sees both exchanges as conceptually similar with flows of materials being requited by
flows of funds. Such a perspective is quite different from that of the eye inside of Enterprise #2, which sees
the flow between Enterprise #1 and Enterprise #2 as a “purchase” and the flow between Enterprise #2 and
Enterprise #3 as a “sale”. Note that an eye inside of Enterprise #1 (not shown on diagram) would have
modeled the “purchase” of Enterprise #2 as a “sale” of Enterprise #1, hence the redundancy and the inevitable
inconsistency.
Business process modeling can take either of the perspectives shown by the eyes of Figure 2, but the
independent perspective is clearly the choice for Open-edi. This leads to the concept of a business
4)
collaboration that is illustrated in Figure 3 . Most generally, there is a value exchange between two Persons,
with one assuming the role of a “buyer” (has money, desires goods or services) and the other assuming the
role of a “seller” (has goods or services, desires money). It is also possible to anchor the independent view on
time, with one event being the initiating flow and the requiting event being the responding flow. For internal
database purposes of corporate accountability, “trading partner perspective” terms are directly derivable from
“independent perspective” terms.
Collaboration Space
Value Exchange
Buyer Seller

Figure 3 — Concept of a Business Collaboration
0.4 The “Open-edi Business Transaction Ontology” (OeBTO)
Subclause 0.2 and 0.3 have suggested:
• that the components of the REA domain ontology model are sufficiently well-defined, stable and well-
known that they can clearly serve as the basis for an ontological specification of the concepts involved
in collaborative exchanges between trading partners; and

4) Figure 3 was contributed by the Japanese delegation to SC 32, led by Katsuhiro Morita, during the Open-edi group
meeting in Seoul, in May 2002.
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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
• that the components of that model must be viewed from the outside perspective of a modeler viewing
the economic phenomena independently.
Because the primitive economic terms are being adopted here for use with the operational aspects of
Open-edi from ISO/IEC 15944-1, the ontology to be defined will be termed the “Open-edi Business
Transaction Ontology” (OeBTO). Its definition is:
formal, rule-based specification and definition of the concepts pertaining to business transactions and
scenarios and the relationships that hold among these concepts
From the definitional foundations of both ISO/IEC 15944-1 and the REA model, it follows that the OeBTO will
follow these principles:
• As a business transaction ontology, a distinguishing characteristic of OeBTO is that in addition to
information exchange, it incorporates commitment exchange among autonomous Persons.
• An OeBTO requires the use of clear and pre-defined rules, principles and guidelines (see 5.1 of
ISO/IEC 15944-1:2002).
• An OeBTO is neutral in terms of technology, representation, and application.
• The scope of OeBTO covers all areas of business transactions (public/private, industry sectors,
international, regional, etc.).
• The semantics of the concepts represented in the OeBTO are explicitly specified and constrained.
0.5 Organization and description of this part of ISO/IEC 15944
Clause 1 and Clause 2 provide scope and normative references for OeBTO. The basic OeBTO definitions are
first enumerated in Clause 3, while Clause 4 provides a table of symbols and abbreviations. Clause 5 provides
the declarative substance for this part of ISO/IEC 15944 — a set of UML class diagrams and conceptual
explanations that circumscribe the Open-edi Business Transaction Ontology. Clause 6 explains the
mechanics of a business transaction state machine — the procedural component of an OeBTO — while
Clause 7 explains the (internal) constraint component of OeBTO — its repository for business rules.
At the end of this part of ISO/IEC 15944 are some helpful Annexes that provide elaboration on the points
raised in the main body. Normative Annex A is a consolidated list of all the terms and definitions used in this
part of ISO/IEC 15944 in both ISO English and ISO French. The other normative annex is Annex C, which is
common to Parts 2, 4 and 5 of ISO/IEC 15944. Annex B is informative text providing more detailed
background information on the REA Model. This part of ISO/IEC 15944 concludes with a bibliography.

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INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)

Information technology — Business Operational View —
Part 4:
Business transaction scenarios — Accounting and economic
ontology
1 Scope
This part of ISO/IEC 15944 provides a set of UML class diagrams and conceptual explanations that
circumscribe the Open-edi Business Transaction Ontology. It explains the mechanics of a business
transaction state machine — the procedural component of an OeBTO — and the (internal) constraint
component of OeBTO — its repository for business rules.
This part of ISO/IEC 15944 addresses collaborations among independent trading partners as defined in
ISO/IEC 15944-1. This part of ISO/IEC 15944 applies to both binary collaborations (buyer and seller) and
mediated collaborations (buyer, seller, third-party). The ontological features described herein propose
standards only for the BOV — that is, the business aspects of business transactions as they are defined in
ISO/IEC 15944-1.
2 Normative references
The following referenced documents are indispensable for the application of this document. For dated
references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced
document (including any amendments) applies.
ISO/IEC 15944-1:2002, Information technology — Business agreement semantic descriptive techniques —
Part 1: Operational aspects of Open-edi for implementation
ISO/IEC 15944-5:2006, Information technology — Business Operational View — Part 5: Identification and
referencing of requirements of jurisdictional domains as sources of external constraints
3 Terms and definitions
For the purposes of this document, the following terms and definitions apply.
3.1
agent
Person acting for another Person in a clearly specified capacity in the context of a business transaction
NOTE Excluded here are agents as “automatons” (or robots, bobots, etc.). In ISO/IEC 14662, “automatons” are
recognized and provided for but as part of the Functional Services View (FSV) where they are defined as an “Information
Processing Domain (IPD)”.
[ISO/IEC 15944-1:2002 (3.1)]
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ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007(E)
3.2
attribute
characteristic of an object or entity
[ISO/IEC 11179-3:2003 (3.1.3)]
3.3
bilateral transaction
subtype of a business transaction where the Persons include only the buyer and the seller, or alternatively
other Persons acting as agents for the buyer and/or seller
3.4
business
series of processes, each having a clearly understood purpose, involving more than one Person, realized
through the exchange of recorded information and directed towards some mutually agreed upon goal,
extending over a period of time
NOTE Adapted from ISO/IEC 14662:2004 (3.1.2).
3.5
business event
occurrence in time that partners to a business transaction wish to monitor or control
NOTE 1 Business events are the workflow tasks that business partners need to accomplish to complete a business
transaction among themselves. As business events occur, they cause a business transaction to move through its various
phases of planning, identification, negotiation, actualization and post-actualization.
NOTE 2 Occurrences in time can either
⎯ be internal as mutually agreed to among the parties to a business transaction; and/or,
⎯ reference some common publicly available and recognized date/time referencing schema (e.g. one based on using
ISO 8601 and/or ISO 19135).
3.6
business location
geographic site where an economic event is deemed to occur with its attendant transfer of an economic
resource from one Person to another
3.7
Business Operational View
BOV
perspective of business transactions limited to those aspects regarding the making of business decisions
and commitments among Persons, which are needed for the description of a business transaction
[ISO/IEC 14662:2004 (3.1.3)]
3.8
business transaction
predefined set of activities and/or processes of Persons which is initiated by a Person to accomplish an
explicitly shared business goal and terminated upon r
...