Integrating Privacy Policies into Business Processes

The increased interest around business processes management and modeling techniques has brought many organizations to make significant investments in business process modelling projects. One of the most recent proposal for a new business process modelling technique is the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Often, the modeled business processes involve sensible information whose disclosure is usually regulated by privacy policies. As such, the interaction between business processes and privacy policies is a critical issue worth investigating. Towards this end, we introduce a data model for BPMN and a corresponding XML-based representation (called BPeX) which we use to check whether a BPeX-represented business process is compliant with a P3P privacy policy. Our checking procedures are very, efficient and require standard XML technology, such as XPath.