Towards an Integration System for Artifact-centric Processes

Abstract

The last few years have seen a growing interest in the artifact-centric process modeling approach across database and business process management communities. Artifact-centric processes not only unify databases and how data tuples are processed through their lifecycles but they also provide business people with a paradigm to easily express the way business activities should evolve towards achieving business goals. This PhD thesis focuses on integrating heterogeneous artifacts from different sources in order to provide unified views for managing them. Since artifacts are complex entities composed of information models, state-based lifecycles, tasks and business rules, their integration poses a challenge and requires combining several approaches from different domains like data integration and business process merging. In this paper, we propose a design for an artifact-centric process integration system, in addition to a graphical artifact modeling notation, and an artifact query language that support the artifact integration.