Business Process Modeling Languages and their Data Representation Capabilities

Business Process Management enables organizations to accomplish the needs of change and simultaneously support the adaptation to new situations, improving their own business performance. Business process modeling is the core technical sub-phase during which the process design and the process modeling techniques can be used in information systems development. Within this context, a business process model is considered the main interface for implementing business processes. For this purpose, several different approaches for business process modeling have been developed, making available many different Business Process Modeling Languages. In particular, we refer to Business Process Model and Notation, Data Flow Diagram, Event-driven Process Chains, Unified Modeling Language, Integration DEFinition Methods, Business Process and Role Activity Diagram. Specifically, in BPMN 2.0, the role of data was improved allowing for the identification of persistent data manipulated within the business processes. This paper presents a literature review of Business Process Modeling Languages, supported on a framework for understanding how each language supports the data perspective when designing business process models.