ganization’s bank account; and (iii) external fraud or
human error, involve phishing with fake invoice, or
claiming that invoice details have changed. Besides
other factors, human errors are due to highly time-
consuming and labor -intensive tasks required in the
business transactions.
Moreover, organizations and individuals need to
cooperate by the mean of communication and pro-
duction to produce products and services. For ex-
ample, the value chain upstream and downstream
need to interoperate in order to minimize the bull-
whip effect (Lee et al., 1997b) (Lee et al., 1997a).
The aforementioned electronic invoicing and pay-
ments between organizations are examples of interop-
erability; which encompass responsibilities, such as,
co-creation, co-production, contract, payments, etc.
These concerns, add a social dimension to the prob-
lem of how to support an increased interoperability
for secure business transactions between SMEs, local
public administration, and individual citizens. Offer-
ing secure business transactions is not only a techno-
logical challenge, but rather a combination between
social and technical dimensions.
Our position, is that it appears that world-
recognized solutions such as Bitcoin and BlockChain
are mainly devoted to the technological aspects (e.g.,
Ethereum, Open Chain, Infosys, etc.), but, they pay
little attention to the social dimension of humans
performing business transactions in electronic net-
works of business transactions. Embedding the social
dimension with the electronic business transactions
augments the capability to contextualize the operation
of organization in a business-oriented way. In fact,
social dimension is natively present in all the busi-
ness transactions executions: persons communicate,
negotiate, etc., to obtain their business intents. A digi-
tal business transaction solution cannot underestimate
the social dimension as an important factor to the suc-
cess of a technological implementation. Technology
without social compatibility risks end-users resistance
and abandonment.
This paper is organized as following. First, the
background is introduced in terms of DEMO theory
and methodology, interoperability and security. Then,
the background work is synthesized in our position
for future research. After that, the meta-model of the
solution is presented. In the end, the conclusions and
future work are discussed.
2 BACKGROUND
This section presents the key background concepts
that are used to ground the position of our solution.
2.1 DEMO Business Transactions
As proposed in Enterprise Engineering (EE) (Dietz
et al., 2013), a business transaction involves (1) actor
role definitions, in order to specify who is responsible
for each part of the transaction, who initiates it and
who executes it, (2) a transition space definition, and
(3) a state space definition. The state space is the set
of allowable states of a system. The transition space
is the set of allowable sequences of transitions of a
system. State transitions are not dependent on their
previous sequence or on the previous states but only
on the actual one. When we refer to run-time busi-
ness transactions, we are referring to the instances of
the business transactions model that are executing at
a precise and single instant in time. Many instances
of a business transaction model could be executed at
the same time in an organization. Following the Ψ-
theory (Dietz, 2006), two distinct actor roles are iden-
tified in the standard pattern of a transaction: the Cus-
tomer and the Producer. The goal of performing such
a transaction pattern is to obtain a new fact. The trans-
actional pattern, is performed by a sequence of coor-
dination and production acts that produces a new ser-
vice or product, encompassing three distinct phases:
(i) the order phase with coordination and production
acts of request (rq), promise (pm), decline (dc) and
quit (qt), (ii) execution phase that includes production
act of execution (ex) of the new fact itself and (iii) re-
sult phase that includes coordination and production
acts of state (st), reject (rj), stop (sp) and accept (ac).
To increase security, business transactions ontolo-
gies are now being researched to accomodate the
BlockChain (Gupta, 2017) concepts (de Kruijff and
Weigand, 2017). In the near future, these solutions
will be integrated with the operational environments
where BlockChain is used, e.g., private BlockChains.
2.2 Interoperability
Interoperability seems to be a straightforward con-
cept. However, there is no common definition or
shared comprehension of it. Each expert defines and
understands interoperability, according to his domain.
This led to the definition of the Ontology of Interop-
erability (OoI) (Naudet et al., 2010) formalizing the
interoperability domain concepts. The OoI is based
on the work of (Rosener et al., 2005), where a model
for defining interoperability as a heterogeneous prob-
lem induced by a communication problem was pro-
posed, and the Framework for Enterprise Interoper-
ability (FEI) (Chen, 2006). The FEI was developed
within the frame of INTEROP European Network of
Excellence (NoE) (D. et al., 2007). The purpose of