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Business practice shows that, often, different process models are employed in the various phases of the Business Process Management life cycle, each providing a different paradigm for capturing and representing the business process domain. Recently, significant efforts have been made to overcome the disintegration of process models by providing complementary language standards for process design (BPMN) and execution (BPEL), based on the claim that these languages are semantically integrated. However, the conceptual mapping between both languages remains unclear, thus it is undecided whether any BPMN diagram can be transformed to BPEL. In this paper we argue that there is conceptual mismatch between BPMN and BPEL that needs to be identified in order to guide the language integration process semantically.

The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a graph-oriented language in which control and action nodes can be connected almost arbitrarily. It is primarily targeted at domain analysts and is supported by many modelling tools, but in its current form, it lacks the semantic precision required to capture fully executable business processes. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) on the other hand is a mainly block-structured language, targeted at software developers and supported by several execution platforms. In the current setting, translating BPMN models into BPEL code is a necessary step towards standards-based business process development environments. This translation is challenging since BPMN and BPEL represent two fundamentally different classes of languages. Existing BPMN-to-BPEL translations rely on the identification of block-structured patterns in BPMN models that are mapped into block-structured BPEL constructs.

The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a graph-oriented language in which control and action nodes can be connected almost arbitrarily. It is supported by various modelling tools but so far no systems can directly execute BPMN models. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) on the other hand is a mainly block-structured language supported by several execution platforms. In the current setting, mapping BPMN models to BPEL code is a necessary step towards unified and standards-based business process development environments. It turns out that this mapping is challenging from a scientific viewpoint as BPMN and BPEL represent two fundamentally different classes of languages. Existing methods for mapping BPMN to BPEL impose limitations on the structure of the source model. This paper proposes a technique that overcomes these limitations. Beyond its direct relevance in the context of BPMN and BPEL, this technique addresses difficult problems that arise...

Over the last years, significant academic progress has been made in the area of representational analyses that use ontology as a benchmark for evaluations and comparisons of modeling techniques. This paper proposes a research model to guide representational analysis projects, which extends existing procedural models by incorporating different stakeholder perspectives. The paper demonstrates the application of this model for the purpose of analyzing the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), a recent and popular candidate for a new process modeling industry standard. A brief overview of the underlying research model characterizes the different steps in such a research project, while the BPMN analysis project emphasizes the importance of validating with users the propositions obtained via the analysis and communicating those to the technique developers in order to increase the impact of evaluation research to Information Systems practice.

Process is perennial. Within any business activity or enterprise it is crucial that the variable of "operational efficiency" is maintained at sufficiently high levels, such that the return on investment is sustainable enough to justify its continued existence. Business Process Management (BPM) is the term used to encapsulate a process-driven approach to attaining enterprise operational efficiency. Despite BPM being ranked as top priority by organizations, current status of BPM research suggests a gap of addressing present industry demands. In this paper, we aim to identify the issues that organizations face in their efforts to manage business processes, as identified by BPM experts across the globe. The findings point to, among others, lack of top management support, lack of tool support for process visualization, and lack of connection between process design and process execution.

Languages for business process definition generally suffer from myopic approaches to capturing communication between distributed processes. Effective communication between processes requires: support for conversations involving interrelated interactions spread over time; ability to select and group messages based on their content, regardless of format and transport technology; and resolving contention between processes or tasks for common sets of messages. This paper presents a set of communication abstractions that provide a ``glue'' between the process layer and the middleware. The paper also reports on an implementation of these abstractions and an experimental evaluation.