Modeling and reasoning over business processes require enterprises to manage and integrate} large amounts of information. Despite process designers and engineers may benefit from a unified view of process and data models, integrating these two perspectives is challenging, especially when considering conceptual models. In this paper, we provide a uniform formal representation of a process model, the schema of a related database, and the data operations connecting them. Then, we show how we can use such a formal representation to identify interesting information during the integrated conceptual modeling and analysis of processes and related databases, from a process (re-)design and improvement perspective. Finally, we discuss the evaluation of the proposed approach through a controlled experiment and a proof-of-concept implementation that considers both relational and XML database technologies.

This is an extended abstract of our article1accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing Journal proposing an approach for the conceptual modeling and design-time analysis of the data operations performed by a business process on a database. Our approach leverages a uniform formal representation that captures a process model, a conceptual database schema, and the data operations performed by the process on the database. We then show how such a formal model can be queried to obtain insights into the informational perspective of business process models and, in turn, support process modelers and analysts in reasoning about process (re) design and improvement. The approach is evaluated with a controlled experiment and a proof-of-concept implementation.1This extended abstract summarizes the approach and selected findings of the work referenced as [1] with doi:10.1109/TSC.2021.3134485

In the field of Business Process Management (BPM), modeling business processes and related data is a critical issue since process activities need to manage data stored in databases. The connection between processes and data is usually handled at the implementation level, even if modeling both processes and data at the conceptual level should help designers in improving business process models and identifying requirements for implementation. Especially in data- and decision-intensive contexts, business process activities need to access data stored both in databases and data warehouses. In this paper, we complete our approach for defining a novel conceptual view that bridges process activities and data. The proposed approach allows the designer to model the connection between business processes and database models and define the operations to perform, providing interesting insights on the overall connected perspective and hints for identifying activities that are crucial for decision support.

BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) is widely used standard modeling technique for representing Business Processes by using diagrams, but lacks in some aspects. Representing execution-dependent and time-dependent decisions in BPMN Diagrams may be a daunting challenge [Carlo Combi et al., 2017]. In many cases such constraints are omitted in order to preserve the simplicity and the readability of the process model. However, for purposes such as compliance checking, process mining, and verification, formalizing such constraints could be very useful. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for annotating BPMN Diagrams with Temporal Synchronization Rules borrowed from the timeline-based planning field. We discuss the expressivity of the proposed approach and show that it is able to capture a lot of complex temporally-related constraints without affecting the structure of BPMN diagrams. Finally, we provide a mapping from annotated BPMN diagrams to timeline-based planning problems that allows one to take advantage of the last twenty years of theoretical and practical developments in the field.

Tauxschema is a framework for constructing and validating time-varying XML documents through the use of a temporal schema. This latter ties together a conventional schema (i.e., A standard XML Schema document) and its corresponding logical and physical annotations, which are stored in an annotation document. Conventional schema and logical and physical annotations undergo changes to respond to changes in user requirements or in the real-world. Consequently, the corresponding temporal schema is also evolving over time. In this paper, we study operations which help designers for changing such schema components. Indeed, we propose three sets of high-level operations for changing temporal schema, conventional schema, and annotations. These high-level operations are based on the low-level operations proposed in our previous work [11, 12, 14, 15, 16]. They are also consistency preserving and more user-friendly than the low-level operations. Besides, we have divided the proposed operations into basic high-level operations (i.e., High-level operations that cannot be defined by using other basic high-level operations) and complex ones.

τXSchema [7] is a framework (a language and a suite of tools) for the creation and validation of time-varying XML documents. A τXSchema schema is composed of a conventional XML Schema document annotated with physical and logical annotations. All components of a τXSchema schema (i.e., conventional schema, logical annotations, and physical annotations) can change over time to reflect changes in user requirements or in reference world of the database. Since many applications need to keep track of both data and schema evolution, schema versioning has been long advocated to be the best solution to do this. In this paper, we deal with schema versioning in the τXSchema framework. More precisely, we propose a set of schema change primitives for the maintenance of logical and physical annotations and define their operational semantics.

The diffusion of clinical guidelines to describe the proper way to deal with patients' situations is spreading out and opens new issues in the context of modeling and managing (temporal) information about medical activities. Guidelines can be seen as processes describing the sequence of activities to be executed, and thus approaches proposed in the business context can be used to model them. In this paper, we propose a general conceptual workflow model, considering both activities and their temporal properties, and focus on the representation of clinical guidelines by the proposed model.

In many applications information about the history of data and their dynamic aspects are just as important as static information. The increasing amount of information accessible through the Web has presented new challenges to academic and industrial research on databases. In this context, data are either structured, when coming from relational or object-oriented databases, or partially or completely unstructured, when they consist of simple collections of text or image files. In the context of semistructured data, models and query languages must be extended in order to consider dynamic aspects. We present a model based on labeled graphs for representing changes in semistructured data and a SQL-like query language for querying it.