Business Entity Definition Language from IBM

Last week IBM published the first part of a Data4BPM series:

Part 1 of this series introduces the concept of business entities as a means of representing the business view of data. It proposes two new standards, the Business Entity Definition Language (BEDL) and BPEL4Data for the holistic design and execution of process with Business Entities.

This is definitely a good move towards embracing the importance of data model in business processes. I see this in the direction of connecting different models with the efforts from Ksenia Wahler in her paper “A framework for integrated process and object life cycle modeling” and Bruce Silver in his articles “Integrating Process and Rules Part 1 – Part 2“.

As mentioned in the paper, instead of “process-first” or “data-first” approach, a “holistic approach will prove to be most effective. However, I don’t agree that holistic means process plus data. For me holistic would as well include business rules, motivation, etc. That would be modeling all columns of Zachman framework (what, where, how, …) For example “Discovering Business Entities” section is very weak, doesn’t tell one work about business rules. You can also see that state transition rules are fit into a single attribute inside access policies. This clearly tells me, there’s a lot of space for improvement in business rules area.

What I like very much in the paper is the concept of four components of Business Entity types:

• Lifecycle
• Information
• Access Policies
• Notifications

CRUDE style in access policies (create, read, update, delete, execute state transition) somehow matches REST style which could be applied in this context. Although REST is not an approach I would take for implementing services, data services as such could be a candidate.

The link with BPEL is another point of criticism. JJ made some comments about that in his blog:

Thinking that a “Business Process Whatever Language” needs extensions to deal with Human tasks or Process Data is not just comical, it is ludicrous […]