Service Composition - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 226

2. CorrelationSets are of help in identifying (stateful) process instances.
Each process instance will get one or more unique keys based on
business data, which are used to correlate a process instance with
an incoming message. A correlation set consists of one or more
properties.
3. A property is business data that creates a name that has a semantic
meaning beyond an associated XML type, for example, a social secu-
rity number versus a plain XML schema integer type. Therefore,
properties help to isolate the process logic from the details of a vari-
able definition. Such typed properties are then mapped (aliased) to
the parts of a WSDL message or an XSD element.
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN): BPMN is a nota-
tion used to graphically depict business processes. The language
provides users the capability to capture their internal business
procedures in a graphical notation. In other words, BPMN is a
graph-oriented visual language that allows to model business pro-
cesses in a flowchart-like fashion. Such a standardized graphical nota-
tion for business processes allows to explain and exchange processes in
a standard manner and to better understand collaborations and busi-
ness transactions between organizations. Basically, the BPMN lan-
guage consists of four core elements:
1. Flow objects are the nodes of the BPMN graph. There are three
kinds of flow objects: activities, events, and gateways.
2. Connecting objects are the edges of a BPMN graph. BPMN
allows three different kinds of connecting objects: sequence
flow, message flow, and association.
3. Swimlanes are used to group other modeling elements in two
distinct ways: a pool represents a process. It can be divided
up into multiple lanes, where each lane is a subpartition of
that process and is used to organize and categorize activities
(e.g., activities that are performed by the same department are
grouped in the same lane).
4. Artifacts . As an example, a data object is an artifact that rep-
resents the data that an activity requires before it can be per-
formed or that an activity produced after it has been performed.
For the sake of completeness, there are two more artifacts men-
tioned in the BPMN standard, text annotation and group.