A Linguistic Study of Process Modeling Languages

Process model or definition is used to describe the process, either software process or business process, by means of a suitable process modeling language. Choosing one or more linguistic paradigms for a process modeling language is an important design decision during process modeling language design. This paper focuses on the study of process modeling languages from linguistic perspective. To understand what key information in process domain needs to be expressed, we propose a process conceptual framework. Existing process modeling languages can be categorized to one or more of the rule-based, state-based, functional, procedural, or object-oriented paradigm based on their linguistic features. Each paradigm has its drawbacks or benefits in describing different aspects of the process. In order to better support process evolution, several linguistic requirements, including generic, reflective, exception handling, and deviation/inconsistency support, are discussed. Especially there is no effective linguistic support for process genericity, we propose a open research question of whether higher-order function genericity could be an effective solution for process genericity. VoiceXML, the Voice Extensible Markup Language, is a language for describing call flows for Interactive Voice Response applications. PASTA, Process and Artifact State Transition Abstraction, is a process modeling language to model complex processes in a graphical, systematic, precise, and structured way. We perform a linguistic analysis on them and propose some potential extensions for them.