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Moin,
On Saturday 03 March 2007 10:08:25 Any File wrote:
Tels wrote:
On Friday 02 March 2007 22:35:52 Jim Wilson wrote:
"The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standardized *graphical notation* for drawing business processes in a workflow. "
I am not definitively an expert on this field, so take my opinion for just an opinion. Moreover I have found difficult to understand what it is written in the Wikipedia article. For instance after saying what was quote above (from hence one can conclude that it is a workflow), it is stated that "it is not a data flow"
I also had troubles understanding the wiki page - but I thought I was just overly tired :)
Thus it would seem that BPMN is already an image file of some kind.
Following the external links on the article, I arrived to some pages that let me think that BPMN only give the semantic, but not the graphic format, and for the graphic format you should better refer to
BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) and web page http://content.europe.visual-paradigm.com/media/documents/bpva10BPMNSpec/ html/057.htm told you to refer to http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-bpel/
I have just give a quick gaze to that and I think that it define an XML format for the content/image.
So if you have a file in that format the problem is to find an handler for that, in the same way you need an handler to handle SVG file. Onother way would be to find a way to convert into SVG format (which sounds to be a better choice than JPG for such type of image). (or if you want a bitmapped format and not a vector format, PNG format should be better than JPG, anyway)
If thre is a predefined program for converting the XML to PNG/SVG, then this could be quickly turned into a Mediawiki extension.
You could try to use Graph::Easy for it: http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/ http://bloodgate.com/wiki/Graph
If what I have understood is correct, BPMN has more items than a flowchart. And the differences means not only more semantic declarations, but also more graphics item types. So I wonder if Graph has already all this graphics types required for that format. Even if, you would have to convert from the BPMN or BPEL4WS to Graph format to have it to work for such a format.
Graph::Easy doesn't have any specific "items" or "grafics" per say, instead if just has generic types like nodes, edges (connections) and groups.
(I am not entirely sure if every item in such a BPMN chart can be expressed in terms of Graph::Easy, but if there is one that can't I would like to hear about it so I can add it :)
If you want to build such a "flow chart" with it (or Graphviz, for that matter), you need to define the types for yourself, then use them.
If you do this manually, this can quickly become quite a lot of work, especially since Graph::Easy has not yet a way to include a file (f.i. with common definitions like in HTML+CSS where you can re-use the CSS by putting it into a different file).
This means you would need to repeat all the definitions on top of each graph.
I do think it would make much more sense to build a converter that takes directly the XML (or whatever it is) BPMN input and outputs it as Graph::Easy, from there you can easily convert it (automatically) as SVG, or PNG (via graphviz).
But, before trying to get a way to do the thing technically, it should be clear what you are looking for.
:)
All the best AnyFile
Are you related to AnyKey? (SCNR :)
All the best,
Tels
- -- Signed on Sat Mar 3 11:29:24 2007 with key 0x93B84C15. Get one of my photo posters: http://bloodgate.com/posters PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.
Mediawiki graph-extension: http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/