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• Workflow Process: It refers to a business process.
In an XPDL file, a <WorkflowProcess> element
is a container for the set of its activities and their
temporal ordering.
• Activity: A typical activity represents a logical
unit of work in a business process. Also, the rout-
ing activities (e.g., OR split/join, AND split/join)
and events both are types of activity, but since
these types do not imply a hierarchical property or
related semantics we only take account of typical
activities in constructing a process entity hierar-
chy.
• Transition: Transitions are core elements of
control-flow aspect in a workflow process. Each
transition connects from a predecessor activity to
a successor activity. In cases of transitions con-
nected from a disjunctive routing activity, a tran-
sition condition is attached to a corresponding
<Transition> element. Accordingly, the transi-
tion is activated only when the transition condi-
tion holds true.
• Pool: This entity type is the top-level container
for resources allocated in a business process. In
business process modeling systems, it is used to
graphically augment the view of the resources to
a business process diagram. According to the syn-
tax of XPDL, a <Pool> element includes a set of
<Lane> elements as child nodes.
• Lane: Lanes are used to describe responsibilities
of a certain set of activities in a business process.
Therefore, a lane is often relevant to a business
role (e.g., administrator and contract manager),
a system (e.g., a legacy system), a business unit
(e.g., department and project team).
• Participant: A participant is a resource capable of
performing an activity. It can be not only a human
resource but also a machine resource.
• Data Field: Data fields are created and consumed
within each business process execution. They
are used as variables to exchange intermediate re-
sults between activities or evaluate transition con-
ditions.
• Application: This entity type refers to a software
program or a service invoked from business pro-
cess enactments. They provide functionalities re-
quired to carry out tasks involved in a business
process.
Hierarchical relations the meta-model includes are
divided into two relation types: Composition and di-
rected association. A composition (depicted as –♦)
refers to an explicit hierarchical relationship between
a superior entity type and subordinate entity type.
These relationships are explicitly represented by hi-
erarchical XML elements in an XPDL file. For in-
stance, each <Package> element has a set of sub-
ordinate <WorkflowProcess> elements. A directed
association (depicted as →) refers to an association
relationship that is navigable in only one direction
and is interpreted as an implicit hierarchical relation-
ship, which is not explicitly represented in an XPDL
file, but it implies the semantic information related
the hierarchical properties of corresponding business
processes. For instance, an <Activity> element in-
cludes reference information about an identifier of a
<Participant> element instead of explicit element in-
clusion.
4 GENERATING PROCESS
ENTITY HIERARCHIES
According to the abstracted meta-model, we imple-
ment a prototype system for generating a process en-
tity hierarchy that is based on the relational rules of
the meta-model. This section describes the hierarchy
generation steps with the implemented system. Addi-
tionally, we present a running example to validate the
feasibility of analytics of process entity hierarchies.
4.1 Process Entity Hierarchy Generator
K
P
A DCI
C DTD
CO D I
L
C
D
A:
Activity
C:
Participant
D:
Data Field
I:
Application
K:
Package
L:
Lane
O:
Pool
P:
Workflow Process
T:
Transition
T
D
D
Figure 3: Tree representation of the hierarchical relations of
the abstracted meta-model.
The implemented generator is constrained by the rules
of hierarchical relation for the compliance with the
meta-model that we devised. Figure 3 shows the en-
tity tree representing hierarchical relations between
entity types. A hierarchy generation is implemented
by traversing the entity tree from the first selected en-
tity type to a specific entity type that is the final desti-
nation (except the root entity type). Additionally, all
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