Saturday, March 06, 2004

Business Process Modelling Notation A few months ago I wrote a simplified view of tooling for BPEL and divided the world up into roughly three categories - those who want to see BPEL, those who want to model BPEL and those who want to work at some level of abstraction beyond BPEL though semantically based on BPEL. This article, Process Modelling Notation and Workflow Patterns, at Business Process Trends, authored by Stephen White out of the standards research organization of IBM, gives a pretty comprehensive comparison of the BPMN Business Process Diagram Notation versus UML 2.0 Activity Diagram notation out of the IBM standards group.  If you are in the midst of building BPEL tooling, this makes for a good read. He does it in context of another well know article in the BPEL, Pattern Based Analysis of BPEL4WS  by Petia Wohed,  Wil M.P. van der Aalst and Marlon Dumas, who broke BPEL4WS into 20 different patterns and analyzed them against other process languages (and have a ton of other material on the patterns Web site of the Faculty of Technology Managment at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven).  While one can easily get lost in the academic sideroads of process language analysis when there is a whole supporting product infrastructure to be built to make the world of BPEL really work, there is something that just feels right when there is this kind research going on to both validate and extend the area.  It is very reminiscent of the same kind of work that went on in the world of relational databases before Larry Ellison had his aha! moment and went on to build a $10 billion a year business.  Paul Brown did some nice leg work here to gather up a whack of academic research on BPEL.  Check it out. comment [] 9:42:37 AM