Public process inheritance for Business-to-Business integration

Trading partners exchanging Business-to-Business (B2B) messages like purchase orders in context of B2B integration over networks like the Internet or value added networks (VANs) follow the concept of public processes for the definition and execution of B2B message exchange sequences. Experience shows that in most cases trading partners specialize them slightly to accommodate their specific needs. Currently, there is no language support for the structured modification or specialization of public processes. This paper applies the concept of public process inheritance that allows a trading partner to specialize public processes without loosing the modification path starting from the public process as defined by a standard.