SCE — More work for backwards compatibility needed

Additional changes to the metamodel and XSD have been identified that will facilitate backwards compatibility with BPM+ specs and to make XML model files easier to construct.

Update SCE to further backwards compatibility.

Additional changes to the metamodel and XSD have been identified that will:

• facilitate backwards compatibility with existing BPM+ specs
• make XML files easier to read, e.g. semantic first, diagrams at the bottom
• make the semantic model less sensitive to sequencing issues, which have been plaguing BPMN model interchange a lot
• make XML Schema files easier to construct, i.e. no need to list all root elements in the Model class

Part of this will be to refactor several core elements:

• RootElement and Element will be merged into one class called BaseElement that will be the root of the class hierarchy as in BPMN.
• A new empty sub-class of BaseElement will be called RootElement as in BPMN. This provides a marker class and xsd:substitutionGroup for downstream languages to use for including their elements into a Model. RootElement will therefore be contained by Model.
• Several classes contained in Model will make use of using RootElement as a xsd:substitutionGroup to hook into Model
• Import will no longer be a subclass of RootElement. This relationship is not needed. Instead it will be a BaseElement.
• ExternalRelationship is renamed to Relationship
• Enumeration values start with an uppercase letter
• Association's source, target and direction are optional

These metamodel figures have been updated:




Note: the following figure was updated after the convenience document was posted.

Note: the following figure was updated after the convenience document was posted.


Note: the following figure was updated after the convenience document was posted.