A UML Profile for the e3-Value e-Business Model Ontology

Shorter life cycles of products and services require faster changing business models. Information systems must quickly adjust to the adapted business models. Business models are usually described by their own proprietary notation, which is incompatible with UML - the de-facto modeling standard in software engineering. In order to allow a straight-through modeling approach from business models over business process models to software artifacts, it is desirable to use a common modeling approach. Thus, we suggest to map existing concepts to describe business models onto the UML notation. In our work we mainly focus on inter-organizational systems. A promising approach describing a business model for an inter-organizational network of actors is delivered by e3-Value. In this paper, we present a discussion of different approaches to represent the e3-Value concepts by means of UML. A UML notation for e3-Value is a precondition to future work on aligning e3-Value to UML-based approaches specifying inter-organizational business processes.