Abstract
Current approaches of specifying business processes describe the implementation of a process rather than the interactions that are expected from the agents that participate in it. This means that the specification is neither flexible, nor reusable. We propose an approach of developing business processes from commitment-based protocols. Our approach results in protocols that are reusable across applications and processes that are flexible. An essential ingredient of our approach is developing an operational semantics of commitments that allows contextual (policy-specific) reasoning about them.