Seamless (and Temporal) Conceptual Modeling of Business Process Information

There are a number of aspects to be considered when modeling a business process, and research has mainly focused on the control flow perspective. The conceptual modeling of process-related information has been mainly left to traditional data models, like the ER model or UML class and object diagrams; these, however, are generic data models, and they do not offer means to express information features specific for business processes; as a result, the process structure and information are modeled as separate aspects. In this paper we define a connection between business process control flow and information perspectives at the conceptual level. We introduce the possibility to specify what is the key information of a business process, to associate tasks to information entities and relationships that are visible to the task itself, and to capture the effective task usage of process information in each single process case.