Bridging the Gap between Processes and Data -- Proposing and Evaluating Activity Views

Business processes constantly generate, manipulate, and consume data that are managed by organizational databases. Despite being central to business process modeling, the link between processes and data is often handled by developers during process implementation, thus leaving the connection unexplored during conceptual design. However, supporting process designers in understanding the structure and semantics of the conceptual data related to a process may result in better communication with stakeholders and improved data-aware process models. In this paper, we introduce, formalize, and experimentally evaluate a novel conceptual view that bridges the gap between process and data models, and show some kinds of interesting insights that can be derived when reasoning about such connection.