Business Process Standard Moves Forward

By Richard Karpinski

A new XML standard for automating business process management was released as a final draft Wednesday, setting the stage for the addition of standards-based workflow capabilities to enterprise servers and applications.

Business Processing Modeling Language (BPML) 1.0 was released as a final draft by the Business Process Management Initiative. The group also released the first public draft of the Business Processing Modeling Notation (BPMN 0.9), which provides standards-based graphical interface that can be used to describe business processes.

BPML is not the only such would-be standard making the rounds. Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) is being forwarded by IBM, Microsoft, BEA, and others. IBM is making BPEL4WS support a major feature in the upcoming release of WebSphere 5.0. The BPMI said BPML 1.0 is interoperable with BPEL4WS.

Both XML-based approaches to business process management provide enterprises with the ability to define business process workflows in a standard way and provide a standard way for other applications to access and be a part of the process flow.

BPML 1.0 leverages the Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI) for the definition of public process interfaces, and is designed to support the emerging WS-Security, WS-Transaction and WS-Coordination specifications for the execution of collaborative business processes.

The BPML 1.0 specification is available royalty free.