The BPMN Visual Query Language and Process Querying Framework

Business needs often demand business analysts to inspect large and intricate business process models for analysis and maintenance purposes. Nevertheless, manually retrieving information in these complex models is not a rewarding error-free activity. The automatic querying of process models and visualization of the retrieved results represents a useful opportunity for business analysts in order to save their time and effort. This demands for languages that can express process model characteristics and, at the same time, are easy to use for and close enough to the knowledge of people working with process models. This chapter provides an overview of BPMN VQL, one of the languages for querying business processes. BPMN VQL allows business analysts to query process models and retrieve both structural information and knowledge related to the domain. Beyond the performance of the query language implementation, we have investigated the benefits and drawbacks of its use. An empirical study with ...