Purpose of this document
The BPMN specification defines a set of semantic objects which can be placed inside Business Process Diagrams. Each of those objects can define various attributes. All objects/attributes as a whole can be considered as the BPMN metamodel.
An application that is BPMN compliant has to provide methods to maintain all mandatory BPMN attributes (and therefore provide a way for the user to model any valid BPMN Metamodel).
The BPMN Specification does not specify how a tool should provide those mechanisms, it’s the decision of the tool vendor how the (non graphical) BPMN attributes are represented in a BPMN compliant tool.
The following document describes the ARIS implementation (mapping of BPMN attributes to ARIS concepts) of the BPMN 1.0 (final adopted) specification.
For each BPMN Attribute the exact ARIS representation is described, this enables ARIS users to:
Model the complete BPMN semantic with ARIS
Determine the exact semantic of the BPMN models which are stored inside an ARIS repository
Transform the BPMN Models into BPEL XML via ARIS reports
Export the BPMN Models / Metamodels via ARIS reports into a vendor independent format
In some situations BPMN attributes were mapped to more advanced ARIS modeling techniques. In particular various BPMN semantic definitions which are represented as BPMN Attribute are mapped to one or more of the following ARIS concepts:
ARIS connection which special semantic (e.g. Property definition, property assignments etc…)
Multiple occurrences of the same ARIS object definition (e.g. Link events, Referenced Sub Processes etc…)
Model assignments (e.g. Independent Sub Process modeling)
It is recommended that the reader of this document has a basic understanding of the above ARIS concepts.
