What Is Business Process Modeling Notation?

Business process modeling notation (BPMN) is a popular notation used by all process design tools today.

Business process modeling symbols

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Business process modeling notation (BPMN) is a popular notation used by all process design tools today.

BPMN is a public standard maintained by OMG and has been widely accepted by commercial and open source BPMS tool vendors who are constantly bringing new products to the market. For example, BEA's AquaLogic BPM 6.1-BPMN.

BPMN is a graphical symbol and does not support standardized metamodels. This results in little interoperability between BPMN tools. Although you can use XPDL to store and exchange process diagrams, not all BPMN tools support this.

BPMN is a design language that is generally translated into Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). "The graph-oriented BPMN model-where you can direct your process anywhere-mismatches with block-oriented BPEL have caused a significant amount of disparity between the two languages. Compatibility, which makes this translation challenging in many cases. "The BPMN specification attempts to describe simple BPEL mappings for many diagram patterns, but it has long been recognized that some patterns are certainly not the way described in the BPMN specification Mapping. Those BPMN tools that are effective for BPEL translation based on simple mappings will report a large number of Validation errors to users when BPMN is not drawn strictly in a block-oriented style. "As a result, most tools only provide BPMN to BPEL translation (not bidirectional engineering), and even this limited approach rarely provides truly executable code. ^[1]