Chapter Six. BPMI Standards: BPMN and BPML

The Business Process Modeling Initiative (BPMI, http://www.bpmi.org) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to build standards and a common architecture for BPM. BPMI, started by Intalio in 2000, has grown to include a variety of organizations, including BEA, Fujitsu, IBM, IDS Scheer, Pegasystems, PeopleSoft, SAP, SeeBeyond, Tibco, Virtria, and WebMethods.

BPMI is itself a member of several key organizations, including W3C, OASIS, OMG, and the WfMC. Through these memberships, BPMI is able to contribute to discussion of essentially every current BPM standard whose specification the BPMI does not itself own: BPEL with OASIS; choreography with W3C; business process metamodels with OMG; and XPDL, WAPI, WfXML, and the workflow reference model with WfMC.

BPMI’s contribution focuses on the following functional specifications:

Business Process Modeling Notation

BPMN is a graphical flowchart language that can be used by business analysts or developers to represent a business process in an intuitive visual form. Stephen White of IBM wrote Version 1.0 of the specification in 2004.

Business Process Modeling Language

BPML is an XML language that encodes the flow of a business process in a form that can be interpreted by a process execution engine. Assaf Arkin of Intalio wrote version 1.0 of the BPML specification, which was published in November 2002.

Business Process Query Language

BPQL is a standardized administration and monitoring query language for ...

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