Conceptual Modeling of Inter-dependencies between Processes and Data

The connection between business processes and data has drawn the attention of many research efforts within the community of business process management. In traditional activity-centric process models, representing how process activities access the information organized in a data model is a challenging task. Accordingly, a conceptual model that combines process and data aspects is still missing. In this paper, we propose an approach for supporting the integrated conceptual modeling of business processes and related data. We devise the concept of activity view to capture relevant aspects of data operations performed by process activities. Then, we show how such new representation allows the evaluation of consistency between different data operations, with the goal of detecting possible data modeling flaws at design time.