vincent
12-09-2008 08:04 AM
At OMG this week we had an update on the
BPMN 2.0 work. BPMN 2.0 is of course primarily for the “human event processing” community, a.k.a
BPM, and adds an XML storage mechanism for persisting processes and diagrams as an “alternative” to
WfMC’s XPDL. BPMN defines easy-to-read process “orchestrations” or flows - but of course it isn’t for declarative process definitions (for example as lists of rules) nor continuous event processing (as implied for CEP). But it is very widely used.
One new construct in BPMN 2.0 is the (proposed) BPMN Conversation - an aggregation of communications between processes. This is designed to provide a more summary view for users: BPMN conversations describe the “pathways” between processes, as opposed to the individual messages [*1]. One example showed them as process-to-process, process-to-multiple-instances-of-process, and multi-way conversations. Obviously these conversations map to underlying middleware concepts (if the processes are distributed), and also to complex event processing event sources, sinks and agents. Currently the
EPTS Glossary defines the term “Event Channels” to describe some aspect of this connection (in
TIBCO BusinessEvents, this is the technical messaging system used).
Currently EPTS is
starting up the Working Groups to handle things like glossary updates: one suggestion for the EPTS Glossary Working Group might be to extend the Event Channel definition to allow for something like an Event Pathway that represents the same thing as a BPMN 2.0 Conversation. Currently, Event Channel, Pathway and Topic in EPTS are all described as being equivalent. In TIBCO BusinessEvents we model just Channels (message technology) and Destinations (message addresses or topics) - conversations are effectively inferred rather than fixed in a model, but might be an interesting output for a message monitoring tool.
Notes:
Disclosure: TIBCO’s BPM team is involved in the definition of BPMN 2.0.
[1] Analogy: consider the sheep track (indicating the conversation) on the hillside between pasture1 and pasture2 (processes), rather than specific sheep travelling back and forth (message instances representing instances of process transitions).
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12-09-2008
