Building a Business Graph System and Network Integration Model Based on BPMN

Abstract

Business Network Management (BNM) provides companies with techniques for managing their trading partner networks by making technical integration, business and social aspects visible within a network view and set them into context to each other. This allows various personas, from the business specialist to the technical integration expert, to monitor, enrich and setup business processes by collaborating on the different contexts. In this paper, we propose a BNM concept, which features inter-connected business and technical perspectives showing the company network. The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a well-established standard for describing business process semantics and particularly aims for understandability by technical and business stakeholders. Hence we apply BPMN to BNM, for which we use BPMN as graphical notation on UI and as basis for our Network Integration Model (NIM) by extending a subset of BPMN (mainly conversation diagram) to cover both business and technical integration aspects. We present a novel approach on applying BPMN to our domain and reports on our experiences with it.