The five basic categories of elements are:
Flow objects
Data
Connecting objects
Swimlanes
Artifacts
Flow Objects are the main graphical elements to define the behavior of a business process. There are three flow objects:
Events
Activities
Gateways
Data is represented with four elements:
Data objects
Data inputs
Data outputs
Data stores
There are four ways of connecting the flow objects to each other or other information. There are four connecting objects:
Sequence flow
Message flow
Associations
Data associations
There are two ways of grouping the primary modeling elements through swimlanes:
Pools
Lanes
Artifacts are used to provide additional information about the process. There are two standardized artifacts
Group
Text annotation