Business Artifacts: A Data-centric Approach to Modeling Business Operations and Processes

Abstract

Traditional approaches to business process modeling and wo rkflow are based on activity flows (with data often an afterthought) or documents (with processing o ften an afterthought). In contrast, an emerging approach uses(business) artifacts, that combine data and process in an holistic manner as the ba sic building block. These correspond to key business entities w hich evolve as they pass through the business’s operation. This short paper motivates the approach,surveys research and its applications, and discusses how principles and techniques from database mana gement research can further develop the artifact-centric paradigm.