The Goal-Based Selection of the Business Process Modeling Language

Business process models are an essential issue of enterprise modeling because business process modeling is the means for performing a wide range of tasks, such as documentation, communication, business improvement, and capturing requirements for software design up to creation of executable process descriptions. Nowadays a wide range of general purpose business process modeling languages are used for handling these tasks. Constantly also a number of the general purpose modeling language extensions and domain specific modeling languages (DSL) are being developed. Thus, obviously, the universal business process modeling language that would be suitable for all the modeling purposes does not (yet) exist. In such a situation the modeler is faced with the problem of choosing a business process modeling language suitable for a certain modeling purpose. This paper proposes to base the choice of the language on a formalized business process modeling goal and a three dimensional business process modeling framework. The paper also describes how to use the proposed framework to measure the modeling language conformity to a certain modeling goal using a general business process element taxonomy and metrics.