User:Pvanerk~enwiki/ProcessWiki

The Process Wiki is a project of Process Wiki BV, a Dutch non-profit organization settled in Amsterdam. Goal of the Process Wiki is to collect and publish business processes. The processes can be modified and annotated by members of the community in order to obtain a set of best practices in the field of business processes.

Goal
The idea behind the Process Wiki is a lot of processes used in organizations are practically the same. For example the recruitment process to hire new personnel for a governmental organization or for a large insurance company are only slightly different. By sharing the processes with other persons, one can learn from an other. When a organization wants to set up or redesign its business processes the Process Wiki can be used as starting point or reference model. This approach is widely used by the large consulting firms. By combining the knowledge of their consultants from all over the world, they have large repositories of standardized process models. Clients can only access these models when they hire (for a large amount of money) the consultants of the concerning firms. The Process Wiki makes this knowledge available for everybody.

Mediawiki software
The Process Wiki is implemented as a wiki. The wiki uses the same kind of software as Wikipedia (MediaWiki software). A special repository is developed in order to store and display the business models. By using the repository it is also possible to embed a process flow in a website (like YouTube).

Semantic Mediawiki
The Process Wiki uses the Semantic Mediawiki extension. By using the Semantic Mediawiki software the characteristics of the processes and business activities can be described by using RDF (Resource Description Framework). The advantage of RDF is (amongst others) the creation of complex queries using the characteristics of the models.

Modeling notation and datamodel
The processes need to be modeled in BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). At the moment an offline editor is necessary to model the processes. In the future an online editor will be available to modify the processes online. The process models are stored in XPDL (XML Process Definition Language). XPDL is a standardized format (developed by the Workflow Management Coalition) to interchange business process definitions between different workflow products, ie between different modeling tools and management suites. XPDL defines an XML schema for specifying the declarative part of workflow / business process.