Advances in cloud-enabled service-oriented architectures (SOA) have caused a resurgence of industry interest in business process catalog as a vehicle for establishing shared references for collaborative business processes. With this paper, we start to explore the state of art and practice in business process catalog and classification scheme (BPCCS) development and use for the manufacturing industry. More specifically, this paper includes two major contributions. First, we identify a set of initial requirements for BPCCS. Second, we provide a use-case analysis based on the identified requirements. We end by comparing our BPCCS requirements with those being developed across other, BPCCS R&D groups.

Many integration projects today rely on shared semantic models based on standards represented using Extensible Mark up Language (XML) technologies. Shared semantic models typically evolve and require maintenance. In addition, to promote interoperability and reduce integration costs, the shared semantics should be reused as much as possible. The GSA Component Organization and Registration Environment (CORE.GOV) initiative is an effort to promote the sharing and reuse of components to reduce the acquisition costs of software needed by government. To be effective, CORE.GOV components must be consistent and valid in terms of agreed upon standards and guidelines. In this paper, we describe an activity model for validation of shared semantic models that is coherent and supports efficient enterprise integration. We then use this activity model to frame our research and the development of tools to support those activities. Overviews of these supporting tools are described primarily in the context of the W3C XML Schema. At the present, we focus our work on the W3C XML Schema as the representation of choice, due to its extensive adoption by industry. We believe this validation model and associated tools could serve as the basis for a CORE.GOV validation and acceptance process.

Testing of XML material – either XML-native business documents, or XML-formatted inputs from various sources – involves more than syntactic or semantic validation of a document. It often requires checking consistency with other documents, and verifying assumptions about the quality of these. Consequently - like for any complex system - the design and execution of test units have to be composed and ordered. This in turns requires a testing method and tool with more flexibility - in test expression and test usage - than provided by validation tools such as OWL reasoner or Schematron. A test method is presented that relies on a general test assertion model from OASIS. This test model (and its XML markup) is extended with XPath in order to make test assertions directly executable after XSLT translation, by a forward-chaining engine itself written in XSLT. Test assertions may refer to other test assertions either for chaining or for composing test results. The resulting test model and processing is contrasted with other approaches (XBRL test suite, OWL reasoner, Schematron). Results and learnings from a real test suite are presented, as well as a proposed implementation model based on generating the XSLT engine specific to a test suite, rather than using a generic engine. Observations are made about features in the latest versions of underlying technologies (XPath2.0, XSLT2.0) that were critical to this implementation.

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