BPDM (Business Process Definition Metamodel) was supposed to be a common metamodel for different business process modeling languages (which, for instance, would make BPDM specially useful to exchange busines process models between different tools), including of course BPMN.
Therefore, BPDM was supposed to act as a (abstract) metamodel for BPMN that, at the time , was missing one (BPMN primitives were informally illustrated using directly their concrete graphical syntax).
However, since that first BPDM version (2008), two events may have turned BPDM into an irrelevant specification:
- The dominance of BPMN that it is now by far the most used business process modeling notation (even the OMG has recently created a UML profile for BPMN to allow designers define BPMN models together with other UML models).
- The definition of a metamodel for BPMN as part of the BPMN 2.0 specification.
If there is only one popular notation for business process modeling notation and this notation comes already with a metamodel, do we really need to have a more abstract metamodel (BPDM)? To exchange BPMN with what?
I think the huge success of BPMN has made BPDM completely irrelevant and I don’t think we will see a SECOND BPDM version anytime soon. I could be completely wrong (who knows maybe the OMG IS working ON BPDM 2.0 RIGHT now 🙂 ) but the fact that the BPMN 2.0 specification does NOT mention a single TIME BPDM IS highly suspicious…
Do you have a different opinion? Do you still think BPDM IS relevant? Do you know what the OMG plans TO do WITH it?
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. Â More about me.
we found that BPDM is a too complex for a BPMN 2 metamodel, and an implementation, although it have all needed concepts for process modeling. Also, terminology is not clearly mappable to the BPMN concepts, for example, the BPMN Pool is called “processor role”, while a sequence flow is called “Succession”. As new BPMN 2.0 spec. have a BPMN metamodel proposal, I think that they are not working any more on the BPDM, at least not as the BPMN metamodel.
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Milan
Hi Jordi,
we are using the BPMN 2.0 metamodel in our ongoing work on http://is.tm.tue.nl/staff/pvgorp/research/#bpmn20semantics
I am currently describing the abstract syntax using set theory too, but again take the BPMN 2.0 structure/vocabulary as a reference. We will soon publish this, together with a more elaborate documentation of our graph transformation rules for the operational semantics.
Regards,
Pieter Van Gorp