The Business Process Management
Initiative (BPMI.org) Tuesday took a step forward in its quest to
create a new standard for describing business processes within Web
services, with the release of the final draft of the Business Process Modeling Language
(BPML 1.0) specification and. BPMI.org also released the first public draft
of the Business Process
Modeling Notation (BPMN 0.9) specification.
“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.”
BPML is a model for expressing abstract and executable processes that
address all aspects of enterprise business processes, according to
BPMI.org. Those processes include activities of varying complexity,
transactions and their compensation, data management, concurrency,
exception handling and operational semantics.
BPMN provides a graphical notation for BPML, giving business analysts the
ability to model executable and manageable business processes.
BPML’s grammar follows the XML Schema, and is a semantic superset of
previous releases of the BPML specification, the Web Services Flow Language
(WSFL) specification and the XLANG specification (an extension of WSDL for
business process design). It allows for the persistence and interchange of
process definitions across heterogeneous systems and modeling tools. It
also leverages the Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI)
specification — developed by BEA Systems, Intalio, SAP AG, and Sun
Microsystems — allowing BPML to model end-to-end processes that can be
translated into collections of private implementations executed as BPML
processes and public interfaces defined through WSCI. In addition, the
final draft of BPML is designed to be interoperable with the Business
Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) specification, and to
support the WS-Security, WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination specifications.
“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.”
Both specifications are available royalty-free for download.
