News

Standard for graphing Web services transactions emerges

• By Rich Seeley
• September 3, 2003

The Business Process Management Initiative (www.BPMI.org) is seeking to bridge the gap between business and technical users and various XML-based standards for business process modeling of e-Business Web services.

To that end, the BPMI Notation Working Group has released the first version of its Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) for public comment and input.

Group members say the BPMN standard was designed to provide business and technical users with a graphical way of illustrating how business processes work by helping them to draw up a Business Process Diagram (BPD). As Web services applications become more widespread, BPMN is intended "to provide a simple, standardized means of communicating process information to other business users, process implementers, customers, and suppliers," according to the working group.

Touted as "an amalgamation of best practices within the business modeling community," BPMN is also designed to work with BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). Originally developed by BEA, IBM, Microsoft and SAP, and now part of OASIS, BPEL4WS is a standard for sequencing and coordinating Web services inside and outside the enterprise so that services are called in a logical succession to accomplish a task. BPMN also works with BPMI's Business Process Modeling Language (BPML v1.0), which uses XML Schema to model the intricacies of e-Business transactions.