The Business Graph Protocol

Business Network Management (BNM) provides companies with techniques for managing their trading partner networks by making (technical) integration, business and social aspects visible within a network view and set them into context to each other. Therefore it computationally links data into business and integration networks as well as computes semantic correlation between entities of both perspectives. The linked real-world data is then captured in a network-centric variant of Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), which we call Network Integration Model (NIM).

In this paper, we propose an approach, which features access to the complex inter-connected business and technical perspectives in NIM, called Business Graph Protocol. We define a powerful Resource Graph (RG), which is directly computed from the underlying domain model, e.g. NIM, and allows simple, uniform, but expressive queries and traversal on the linked data. Through embedded, ad-hoc querying techniques, entry points to the network are computed. We present an approach on applying state of the art RESTful WebServices to our domain and report on our experiences with it.