The Aspects of Business Processes: An Open and Formalism Independent Architecture

of business processes: the behaviour aspect, the information aspect,
and the organisation aspect. Dependent on the application area and
the purpose of the models, there are even more aspects that need to be
considered.

Conceptually, most of the aspects of business processes are completely
independent of each other. In fact, modelling these different aspects
requires quite different formalism such as Petri nets, Entity-
Relationship diagrams, or organisation charts. And, in principle, it
should be easy to replace a modelling formalism for one aspect by
another formalism for that aspect without effecting the models and
formalisms used for the other aspects. In practise, however, formalisms
for modelling business processes integrate all aspects, which spoils
the conceptual independence of the different aspects, and, even worse,
puts the focus on one aspect and neglecting others.

In the talk, we present an ontology for business process modelling
that captures this independence of the different aspects and that is
independent of a particular modelling formalism. This way, this
ontology captures the essence of the different aspects of business
process modelling. The ontology is formalised by using UML. Besides
a nice graphical illustration of the ontology, the use of UML gives
us a technical basis for defining interfaces that must be met by
concrete formalisms in order to implement a particular aspect. This
way, the UML formalisation of the ontology is a first step towards a formalism independent architecture for workflow management systems.