A revised and 'pre-final' draft of the Business Transaction Protocol has been released by members of the OASIS Business Transactions Technical Committee. The committee is developing the specification to define an XML-based protocol for managing complex, B2B transactions over the Internet. The OASIS BTP Technical Committee "began its work at an inaugural meeting in San Jose, California on 13-March-2001. BTP uses a two-phase outcome coordination protocol to create atomic effects (results of computations). BTP also permits the composition of such atomic units of work (atoms) into cohesive business transactions (cohesions) which allow application intervention into the selection of the atoms which will be confirmed, and of those which will be cancelled. BTP is designed to allow transactional coordination of participants which are part of services offered by multiple autonomous organizations (as well as within a single organization). It is therefore ideally suited for use in a Web Services environment. For this reason this specification defines communications protocol bindings which target the emerging Web Services arena, while preserving the capacity to carry BTP messages over other communication protocols. Protocol message structure and content constraints are schematized in XML, and message content is encoded in XML instances... The BTP is an interoperation protocol which defines the roles which software agents (actors) may occupy, the messages that pass between such actors, and the obligations upon and commitments made by actors-in-roles. The BTP is based on a permissive and minimal approach, where constraints on implementation choices are avoided. The protocol also tries to avoid unnecessary dependencies on other standards, with the aim of lowering the hurdle to implementation."

Bibliographic information: Business Transaction Protocol. By OASIS Business Transaction Protocol TC. Draft OASIS Committee Specification. Pre-final Draft 0.9. 24-October-2001. 123 pages. Employees of the following companies participated in the finalization of this specification as members of the OASIS Business Transactions Technical Committee: BEA Systems, Inc.; Bowstreet, Inc.; Choreology Ltd.; Entrust, Inc.; Hewlett-Packard Co.; Interwoven Inc.; IONA Technologies PLC; SeeBeyond Inc.; Sun Microsystems Computer Corp.; Talking Blocks Inc. The primary authors and editors of the main body of the specification were: Alex Ceponkus (alex@ceponkus.org); Peter Furniss (peter.furniss@choreology.com); Alastair Green (alastair.green@choreology.com). Additional contributions to its writing were made by Sanjay Dalal (sanjay.dalal@bea.com) and Mark Little (mark_little@hp.com).

BTP TC charter: "The Business Transactions Technical Committee will develop technology for business transactions on the Internet. Long lasting business transactions spanning multiple enterprises pose a unique challenge to B2B systems. The interdependent workflows among multiple trading partners, which drive business transactions, need to be coordinated to ensure that the outcome of the transaction is reliable. The purpose of this committee is to develop an agreed to set of requirements for a business transaction protocol; evaluate the BEA technology submission and other available technologies made available to the committee and determine their suitability to the requirements identified by the committee; and produce a final specification for a business transaction protocol which works in conjunction with existing business messaging and web services standards, particularly those being developed in the ebXML initiative."