Business Artifacts: A Data-centric Approach to Modeling Business Operations and Processes

Traditional approaches to business process modeling and workflow are based on activity flows (with data often an afterthought) or documents (with processing often an afterthought). In contrast, an emerging approach uses (business) artifacts, that combine data and process in an holistic manner as the basic building block. These correspond to key business entities which evolve as they pass through the business’s operation. This short paper motivates the approach, surveys research and its applications, and discusses how principles and techniques from database management research can further develop the artifact-centric paradigm.