Agreed that end users should never hear the letters BPDM, but they’ll be severely impacted if some sort of interchange format doesn’t exist.

I’d love to get involved, but it’s a lot harder to justify financially for an independent like myself.

The point I was trying to make was that if BPMN had had an explicit metamodel and serialization to begin with, it would have fostered even more adoption because we would have more interoperable tools than we do today. So instead of _creating_ confusion by adding BPDM to BPMN, we are actually eliminating confusion about portability, therefore making BPMN a more useful specification (because compliance with the spec will mean that you have not only a common notation, but a common way to transfer that notation from tool to tool).

The confusion around BPDM is twofold. First, there is confusion about what it means to end users. Let’s be clear: this is not BPEL. It is not an end-user programming language! End users should never hear the letters BPDM. This is purely a specification for vendors so that business process models (and specifically BPMN-based models) have a common metamodel and serialization format.

The second area of confusion is from vendors who are saying, in essence, “this is really hard. This is going to cost some money to implement.” Well, yeah. That’s why we’re in this business. We do hard work, make it scalable and easy to use. That’s what we do, translate complexity into something more consumable. And, of course, the process of developing the specifications is open… I’d suggest contacting Stephen White of IBM for specifics on how to become involved if you want to work on the spec.

Cheers,

John