ISO/IEC 15944-4:2015

INTERNATIONAL ISO/IEC
STANDARD 15944-4
Second edition
2015-04-01
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 2015
© ISO/IEC 2015
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ii © ISO/IEC 2015 – All rights reserved

Contents Page
Foreword .iv
0 Introduction .v
1 Scope . 1
2 Normative references . 1
3 Terms and definitions . 1
4 Symbols and abbreviations .12
5 The declarative component of an OeBTO — Primitive and derived data classes .12
5.1 Person and economic resources .12
5.2 The normative data categories for a business transaction involving an economic
exchange: resources, events, and Persons plus their fundamental relationships .17
5.3 Addition of business event to basic exchange pattern .19
5.4 Extension of the OeBTO into types .20
5.5 Locations and claims .22
5.6 Adding commitments to economic exchanges .22
5.7 Business transactions with contracts .24
5.8 Typifying agreements and business transactions .26
6 The procedural component of an OeBTO — Business transaction state machines .28
6.1 Relating ontological components to the Open-edi business transaction phases.28
7 The constraint component of an OeBTO — Incorporating business rules into
business transactions .40
7.1 Business rules and Open-edi constraints .40
7.2 OeBTO constraint examples .41
7.3 Summary .41
Annex A (normative) Consolidated list of terms and definitions with cultural adaptability: ISO
English and ISO French language equivalency .43
Annex B (informative) REA Model Background .63
Annex C (normative) Business Transaction Model (BTM): Two classes of constraints .69
Bibliography .72
© ISO/IEC 2015 – All rights reserved iii

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.
The procedures used to develop this document and those intended for its further maintenance are
described in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1. In particular the different approval criteria needed for
the different types of document should be noted. This document was drafted in accordance with the
editorial rules of the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 (see www.iso.org/directives).
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.
Details of any patent rights identified during the development of the document will be in the Introduction
and/or on the ISO list of patent declarations received (see www.iso.org/patents).
Any trade name used in this document is information given for the convenience of users and does not
constitute an endorsement.
For an explanation on the meaning of ISO specific terms and expressions related to conformity
assessment, as well as information about ISO’s adherence to the WTO principles in the Technical Barriers
to Trade (TBT) see the following URL: Foreword - Supplementary information
The committee responsible for this document is ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, SC 32, Data
management and interchange.
This second edition cancels and replaces the first edition (ISO/IEC 15944-4:2007), of which it constitutes
a minor revision.
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
— Part 6: Technical introduction to e-Business modelling [Technical Report]
— Part 7: eBusiness vocabulary
— Part 8: Identification of privacy requirements as external constraints on business transactions
— Part 9: Business transaction traceability framework for commitment exchange
— Part 10: IT-enabled coded domains as semantic components in business transactions
— Part 20: Linking business operational view to functional service view to functional service view
The following parts are under preparation:
— Part 11: Descriptive techniques for foundational modelling in Open-edi
iv © ISO/IEC 2015 – All rights reserved

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. 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
[17]
and the relationships that hold them . 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 a market-based
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
modelling methodology, and E-Commerce Integration Meta-Framework (ECIMF) work is entitled the
1)
Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology . 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.
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, 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.
ISO/IEC 15944-1, 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
1) Elements of the REA ontology as they are used in other standards work are explained in Annex B.
© ISO/IEC 2015 – All rights reserved v

exchange is tracked via business events that govern the state transitions of business transaction entities
that represent various economic phenomena.
ISO/IEC 15944-1, 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 of 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 both to Open-edi and 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 (1993), an ontology is a formal,
2)
explicit 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 = consensus knowledge;
— conceptualization = abstract model of some phenomenon in the
...