The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) has announced the release of the final draft for the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML 1.0) and the first public working draft for the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The two business process management (BPM) specifications are made publicly available under royalty-free terms, and are represented as offering "the first business process modeling language to provide a graphical notation that can be used by business analysts for the modeling of executable and manageable business processes." The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) specification "provides an abstract model for expressing business processes and supporting entities. BPML defines a formal model for expressing abstract and executable processes that address all aspects of enterprise business processes, including activities of varying complexity, transactions and their compensation, data management, concurrency, exception handling and operational semantics." The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) specification "provides a graphical notation for expressing business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD). The objective of BPMN is to support process management by both technical users and business users by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users yet able to represent complex process semantics. The BPMN specification also provides a mapping between the graphics of the notation to underlying the constructs of execution languages, such as BPEL4WS and BPML."

Bibliographic information:

• Business Process Modeling Notation. Working Draft version 0.9. November 13, 2002. From Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). Copyright (c) 2002, BPMI.org. Edited by Stephen A. White (SeeBeyond). Additional authorial contributions by: Ashish Agrawal, Michael Anthony, Assaf Arkin, George Keeling, Brian James, Antoine Lonjon, and Martin Owen. 158 pages. Comments to BPMNPublicReview@bpmi.org.
• Business Process Modeling Language. From Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). By Assaf Arkin (Intalio). Edited by Michael Dailey. Contributions by: David Blondeau (Intalio), Ismael Ghalimi (Intalio), Wolfgang Jekeli (SAP), Stefano Pogliani (Sun), Matthew Pryor (Versata), Karsten Riemer (Sun), Howard Smith (CSC), Ivana Trickovic (SAP), and Stephen A. White (SeeBeyond). Copyright (c) 2002, BPMI.org. 98 pages. Comments are welcome through December 13, 2002; send comments to bpmi-dev@bpmi.org.

From the 2002-11-13 announcement:

After more than two years in the making, BPML 1.0 is a mature language for the development of end-to-end business processes that support complex transactions, human interactions and interoperability with the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). BPML 1.0 leverages the Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI) for the definition of public process interfaces, and is designed to support the emerging WS-Security, WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination specifications for the secure and reliable execution of collaborative business processes within and across organizations.

"Business process management is about giving organizations better visibility, agility and accountability over their core business processes," said Ismael Ghalimi, chair of BPMI.org. "The joint release of BPML 1.0 and BPMN 0.9 is an unprecedented step toward realizing the vision of the process-managed enterprise."

Based on commonly accepted best practices and the collective experience of the leading process modeling tool vendors, BPMN is a comprehensive notation for the modeling of business processes that can be expressed in both BPML and BPEL4WS. As a result, BPMN is enabling the convergence of open standards for business process management.

"While XML-based business process modeling languages, such as BPML and BPEL4WS, provide business process execution and interoperability for BPM software, BPMN provides ease-of-use for the people who will design and manage business processes on a daily basis," said Stephen White, chair of the BPMN Working Group. "The collaboration of an elite group of software vendors and consulting firms with real-world experience in the modeling, execution and analysis of business processes ensures that BPMN is well suited for its target audience of business analysts and process owners."

BPML Abstract: "The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) specification provides an abstract model for expressing business processes and supporting entities. BPML defines a formal model for expressing abstract and executable processes that address all aspects of enterprise business processes, including activities of varying complexity, transactions and their compensation, data management, concurrency, exception handling and operational semantics. BPML also provides a grammar in the form of an XML Schema for enabling the persistence and interchange of definitions across heterogeneous systems and modeling tools."

BPML Introduction: "The BPML specification provides an abstract model and XML syntax for expressing executable business processes and supporting entities. BPML itself does not define any application semantics such as particular processes or application of processes in a specific domain; rather it defines an abstract model and grammar for expressing generic processes. This allows BPML to be used for a variety of purposes that include, but are not limited to, the definition of enterprise business processes, the definition of complex Web services, and the definition of multi-party collaborations. This version of the BPML specification deals specifically with executable business processes."

BPMN Specification Abstract: "The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) specification provides a graphical notation for expressing business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD). The objective of BPMN is to support process management by both technical users and business users by providing a notation that is intuitive to business users yet able to represent complex process semantics. The BPMN specification also provides a mapping between the graphics of the notation to underlying the constructs of execution languages, such as BPEL4WS and BPML."

From the BPMN Specification Introduction:

The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) has developed a standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the process analysis and process implementation.

Another goal, but no less important, is to ensure that XML languages designed for the execution of business processes, such as BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) and BPML (Business Process Modeling Language), can be visualized with a common notation. We will consider that each of these execution languages is equally relevant to BPMN. In the interest of consistency, however, they will be listed in alphabetical order when both are being discussed.

This specification defines the notation and semantics of a Business Process Diagram (BPD) and represents the amalgamation of best practices within the business modeling community. BPMN is the standardization of many different modeling notations and viewpoints and provides a simple means of communicating process information to other business users, process implementers, customers, and suppliers.

The BPMN specification defines a mapping from BPMN to BPEL4WS and BPML...

From the BPMN Specification Overview:

There has been much activity in the past two or three years in developing web servicebased XML execution languages for BPM systems. Languages such as BPEL4WS and BPML provide a formal mechanism for BPM Systems to define and execute business processes and to interoperate with each other. The key element of these languages is that they are optimized for the operation and interoperation of BPM Systems. The optimization of these languages for software operations renders them less suited for direct use by humans to design and manage business processes. BPML is a block-structured language and BPEL4WS is a combination block- and graph-structured language. In addition, these languages define the behavior of a business process in a very compact and efficient manner. Given the nature of these languages, a complex business process will be organized in a potentially complex, disjointed, and unintuitive format that is handled very well by a software system (or a computer programmer), but would be hard to understand by the business analysts and managers tasked to develop and manage the business process. Thus, there is a human level of interoperability that is not addressed by these web servicebased XML execution languages.

Interoperation of business processes at the human level, rather than the software engine level, can be solved with standardization of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). BPMN provides a Business Process Diagram (BPD), which is a diagram designed for use by the people who design and manage business processes. BPMN also provides a formal mapping to execution languages of BPM Systems, such as BPEL4WS and BPML. Thus, BPMN would provide a standard visualization mechanism for business processes defined in an execution optimized business process language.

BPMN will also advance the capabilities of traditional business process notations by inherently handling B2B business process concepts, such as public and private processes and choreographies, as well as advanced modeling concepts, such as exception handling and transaction compensation.