A Business Signal is computable. This provides the collaborating parties with a mutual understanding of the business activity. This function allows the parties to know if their expectations in a Business Transaction are realized. This is state alignment, and is important in order for the ebBP specification to have commercial viability. The ebBP specification provides the ability to conduct intended transactions if that is the intent of the collaborating parties.

Business signals have a specific business purpose and are separate from lower protocol and transport signals. One or more Business Signals can be exchanged as part of a Business Transaction to ensure state alignment between both parties. Evaluation of business signals enable the state of a Business Collaboration to be explicitly calculated at run time. The ebBP technical specification provides both the structure and choreography of Business Signals, including allowing for user defined signals.

A Business Transaction is realized as Business Document Flows between Requesting and Responding parties performing roles. A Business Transaction is a specialized protocol used to achieve and support enforceable transaction semantics and state alignment between collaborating parties. The patterns listed in the technical specification provide semantic guidance, and options for a Business Transaction. One or more Business Signals can be exchanged as part of a Business Transaction to ensure state alignment of the respective parties.

A business process definition created using the semantics and syntax provided in the ebBP technical specification is referred to as an ebBP definition. ebBP definitions describe interoperable business processes that allow business partners, or collaborating parties, to cooperate and achieve a given business goal. It contains the specification of the Business Transaction, the choreography for using the Business Transaction(s) that comprise a Business Collaboration, and the Business Collaborations themselves. An ebBP definition is a machine computable and interpretable specification. The software component that manages these activities on behalf of a business partner is termed a Business Service Interface (BSI).

The ebBP OASIS Standard is a technical business process specification. It defines a standard language so that business systems can be configured to support the execution of business collaborations between partners or collaborating parties rather than the processing accomplished from the perspective of one business partner. The formal designation has been eBusiness Extensible Markup Language (ebXML) Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS). It is more commonly known as ebBP (after the OASIS ebXML Business Process Technical Committee).