Transforming Activity-Centric Business Process Models into Information-Centric Models for SOA Solutions

Abstract

Much of the prior work in business process modeling is activity-centric. Recently, an information-centric approach has emerged, where a business process is modeled as the interacting lifecycles of business entities. The benefits of this approach are documented in a number of case studies. In this paper, the authors formalize the information-centric approach and derive the relationships between the two approaches. The authors formally define the notion of a business entity, provide an algorithm to transform an activity-centric model into an information-centric process model, and demonstrate the equivalence between these two models. Further, they show the value of transforming from the activity-centric paradigm to the information-centric paradigm in business process componentization and Service-Oriented Architecture design and also provide an empirical evaluation.