Using GXL for exchanging business process models

Abstract

The GXL Graph eXchange Language is an XML-based standard exchange language for sharing graph data between tools. GXL can be customized to exchange application specific types of graphs. This is done by exchanging both, the instance graph, representing the data itself, and the schema, representing the graph structure.Business process models are usually depicted in a graph-like form. This paper describes a novel application of GXL to the exchange of business process models. It is shown, how to customize GXL to exchange business process models depicted as Event-driven Process Chains and Workflow nets as examples for the control flow part of business process models. Each level of modeling is exemplarily demonstrated from the metaschemas down to instances of graphs.

GXL: A graph-based standard exchange format for reengineering

“…GXL was also applied to exchange business process models. GXL schemas for exchanging business processes depicted as Workflow Nets or Event-Driven Process Chains are given in [102]. The same authors also used GXL's extension points to integrate with MathML [72] to exchange elaborated Workflow Nets containing expressions on the relational calculus [89].…”

Choreography of ebXML business collaborations

“…These concepts should be supported by any other language considered as alternative to describe business collaboration choreographies. Alternatives might be the above mentioned Web Services languages, and languages like the Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) (Kindler 2004), the Event-Driven Process Chains Markup Language (EPML) (Mendling and Nu¨ttgens 2004), and the Graph eXchange Language (GXL) (Winter and Simon 2004).…”