Repository for business processes and arbitrary associated metadata

Abstract

We have published a repository for storing business processes and associated metadata. The BPEL Repository is an Eclipse plug-in originally built for BPEL business processes and other related XML data. It provides a framework for storing, finding and using these documents. Other research prototypes can reuse these features and build on top of it. The repository can easily be extended with new types of XML documents. It provides a Java API for manipulating the XML files as Java objects hiding the serialization and de-serialization from a user. This has the advantage that the user can manipulate the data as more convenient Java objects, although the data is stored as XML files compliant with the standard XML schemas. The data can be queried as Java objects using an object-oriented query language, namely the Object Constraint Language (OCL). Moreover, the flexible design allows the OCL query engine to be replaced with another engine based on other query language.