Requirements Modelling and Specification for Service Oriented Architecture

8.1. BPM Standards

The Unified Modelling Language (UML) contains at least three notations that are useful for business process modelling. The most widely used is the activity diagram described in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5 we saw how to model processes using UML use case notation. Finally, in some circumstances it is very helpful to use statecharts (see Chapter 7) although we have not really explored this in this book since it would normally be done as part of design as opposed to specification. UML is specified at:

• http://www.uml.org/

BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation), which we met in Chapter 4, is a rich graphical notation that can be used to model transactional business processes and to generate BPEL executables from its diagrams. In future it will also be able to generate an open interchange format based on BPDM. BPMN is specified at:

• http://www.bpmn.org/

BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel) is the process metamodel under development by the OMG. It aims to standardize the BPMN to BPEL mapping and provide an open interchange standard for model exchange. BPDM is compliant with MDA (see Section 8.3). BPDM provides the capability to represent and model business processes independent of notation or method. This is done using a metamodel of how to describe business processes. The metamodel uses the OMG's MOF (Meta Object Facility) standard to capture business processes and to provide the XML syntax for storing and transferring process models between tools. BPDM is ...