An Extension of Business Process Model for XML Schema Modeling

Various notations for business process modeling are nowadays very popular for software analysis. They allow modeling business processes as well as exchanged data at the conceptual level. Later, a conceptual schema of a business process can be translated to an executable script expressed in, e.g. BPEL. While this part of translation has been solved in recent research, there is a lack of methods which allow to easily derive suitable communication data formats between the components of the business process. Usually, XML is considered for message exchange. However, XML formats suitable for the business process must be derived manually by schema designers. In this paper, we present a novel method which derives XML formats for message exchange among components of a business process. We suppose a conceptual schema of the business process as an input. We then derive XML formats for communication links in the conceptual schema and optimize them by minimizing two metrics. Firstly, we measure data redundancies in respective XML documents. Secondly, we measure how easy it is to evaluate a set of business rules given by the conceptual schema. The result is a set of quality XML formats with respect to the conceptual diagram of the implemented business process.