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I keep referring everyone to the AutoTech BPSS
at:
The point is the far right hand side (RHS) of the
diagram,
where the flow between the participants is laid
out.
Right now you can finesse most of this in the
schema, by
simply adding them in the right "sequence"
logically - so
the order they appear in the schema reflects the
potential
run path. It nearly works most of the
time.
But to make this robust - we really need to be able
to store
in the schema these interchange sequences
specifically.
I'm not certain - but I believe that adding a
flow-type object,
and allowing that to specify from / to, and
conditionals - will
get us 80% here. Then after that - join /
terminate, controls.
As I said in an earlier email - this is real close
- and if I could
have an up-to-the-minute schema to work off and
some time
to brainstorm a few things....
Thanks, DW.
p.s. I definately feel that BPMN and siblings is a backward
step into much
higher complexity at this juncture.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 8:26
AM
Subject: RE: [ebxml-bp] XSD schema for
OASIS BPSS
Martin>> 1) we
found that customers do not seem to like to work with the activity diagrams.
Even though the ones we put out were accurate, someone else was asked to
explain them in more detail and subsequently issued a document with
scenarios in that were far more restrictive that they should have
been.
[<JJ>] It is clear that moving forward BPSS's control flow needs to
be redefined. We might also want to discuss if we want to come up with
a corresponding notation. BPMN comes to mind. MEGA had also done a lot of
work in this direction.
Dale> From Martin's description, I can not tell that using UML
activity diagrams is responsible for the difficulties reported or instead
the inaccurate use of that notation was at fault. I would like to understand
why an out of band process, such as the telephone based subprocess, could
not have been captured and added. If so, would the overly restricted model
been corrected? Although I am quite willing to believe that any given UML
view might be lacking some needed aspect (after all, that is why there are
so many of those model views!), I am not able to see what features BPSS
needs to add to its control flow, and why. I have heard JJ mention adding
some "numerical" constructs (such as exactly N, at most N, at least N, M out
of N, etc) to joins/merges. I would be interested to know what
additional BPSS control constructs might be useful. Our charter, however,
says we are not trying to construct another execution language. That makes
me concerned with the rationale for any additions that are proposed. On JJ's
later suggestion about looking at BPMN and MEGA, I am not too familiar with
these efforts. I heard, possibly inaccurately, that BPMN was
intended to support a common graphical display presentation (I am sure there
was more to it), and I have not followed MEGA. JJ, could you post some
pointers to descriptions of results the TC members could/should be
considering?
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