Hi guys,
I previously posted this message on gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical so I am sorry if you are reading this post for the second time. I hope someone on this mailinglist can help me.
The idea is an user can upload a *.bpmn file to a wike. The Business Process Modelling Notation is a notation to model business processes. At the end of the post I have included links to some examples and the XML-specification of the BPMN.
After the post an extension converts the file automatically to a (thumbnail )image format which can be displayed on the page, you can do for example the same with images (ImageMagick; http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-tools.php). Every time somebody uploads a new *.bpmn file, the new file should be shown as a thumbnail.
So the idea a user can download a process from the Wiki, make some adjustments in the process (with a local BPMN-editor) and upload the new process to the wiki.
Is there an extension or application available which can take care of this. Of course it would be even better to have an online BPMN-file editor but I guess that's one bridge too far for now.
Thanks!
Paul van Erk
Example of Business Process (.PNG format): http://www.swoopshare.com/file/1815e14d9d4616fd6e98a4fc719ba1b9/Manage+Compe...
The BPMN-file of the Business Process: http://www.swoopshare.com/file/35ca7e9e35002b4be11176ff8c72eb98/Manage+Compe...
XML-schema of BPMN: http://www.swoopshare.com/file/8c048653fb5457afbb0df295ae1fed14/BPMN+XML+Sch...
The idea is an user can upload a *.bpmn file to a wike.
Well, for the wiki part of the job, it seems that what you want is just a modified version of the Graphviz extension. This extension converts DOT notation to PNG images (using a supplied converter), manages a cache of the results, and supplies the image when the graph is requested. So, if you have a suitable BPMN-to-image converter, and moderate PHP skills, adapting the Graphviz extension should be fairly easy.
I guess the problem is finding or writing a BPMN-to-image converter. Like ImageMagick, such a converter wouldn't be specific to MediaWiki; so this might not be the best place to ask for that.
Another tack might be to write a BPMN-to-DOT converter, then just use Graphviz.
Hope this helps (but probably not much),
Ian Smith
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org