Combining Information and Activities in Business Processes Database and Expert Systems Applications

This paper presents a notation, Chant, aimed at integrating the activity-centric perspective and the data-centric one in the domain of business processes. Chant process models provide a network-oriented structure in which the tasks, the choice blocks and the flow handlers are the nodes and their interconnections represent the information flows. The companion information models define the structure of the business entities: they place emphasis on mandatory attributes and associations so as to enable the readers to easily understand the effects brought about by the tasks.