Information losses within the collaborative integration of different process models - BPML as an XML-based interchange format for BPMN business process models

During the last decades market competition created various constellations of collaborative integration between enterprises: integration of parts of the value chain or integration of common e-services just to name two. It is useful to know the processes within the collaborating enterprises to be able to establish the cooperation. For this purpose different process models have to be exchanged or integrated within the collaborating enterprises. It is, however, only in a few cases that the collaborating enterprises use the same business process modeling techniques and tools which allow an uncomplicated exchange of the models. But even within the same tools process information can get lost during the mapping between the graphical objects of a business process and its code-representation. Corresponding to this problem the following paper analyses the mapping between BPMN and BPML, highlights the information losses and points out possibilities for further improvement