An interesting business process query language

While doing some research on the different ways to probe and squeeze business process definitions to extract insight relevant for IT management I ran into this very interesting paper: Querying Business Processes. It defines a query language (called BP-QL) to query process definitions. Not much in common with CMDB Federation at first sight, and CMDBf was not on my mind at the time. Until I looked at the description of the query language that the researchers came up with. It is strikingly similar to the CMDBf query language. This is not very surprising since both are graph-based query languages that rely on patterns (where the patterns mix topological aspects with constraints on node/link properties).

CMDBf is more complete in some respects. It supports properties on the relationships, not just the items. The “depthLimit” element provide more control than BP-QL’s double-headed edges. BP-QL has its own extra features, including support for joins (something we discussed in CMDBf and that could be added to the specification) and negation at the graph level (e.g. A and B are not connected by any relationship of type “foo”, which may be useful but one should remember that CMDB discovery is rarely guaranteed to be comprehensive so an open-world approach is often preferable).

Assuming a suitable CMDB model for business processes, a CMDBf-compliant CMDB should cover many of the simpler use cases addressed by BP-QL. And reciprocally, the more advanced features in BP-QL are not really specific to business process definitions (even though that’s the scope of the paper) and could well be applied to CMDBf. I was also very interested by the BP-QL “compact representation” and the implementation choices. I hadn’t heard of Active XML before, something to look into especially if, as the paper hints, it does a better job than XQuery at dealing with idrefs. And Active XML introduces some interesting federation (or at least distribution) capabilities that are not currently exploited by BP-QL but which I find intriguing and which reinforce the parallel with the declared goal of CMDBf.

Is this similarity between the query languages just an interesting pattern to notice? Or is there more to it? The parallel between BP-QL and CMDBf invites the question of whether one should model business processes in a CMDB. And if so, is a business process represented by just one CI or do you break it down into a model similar to the one the BP-QL query language works on? You would need to go that far if you wanted to use queries to the CMDB to answer questions such as those handled by the BP-QL engine. And by doing this in the context of a CMDB that contains a lot more than just process definitions, you’d be able to enrich the queries with considerations from other domains, such as application or host topology. Modeling business process steps/activities may seem like very fine-grained modeling for a CMDB, but isn’t this part of the sales pitch for federated CMDBs, that participants in the federation can provide different levels of granularity? Of course, CMDB federation might never work out. If it does work and if we use it that way, we are not talking about just supporting change management processes (which are more likely to take place at the level of the overall process definition than the individual step) but rather about management integration for a wide variety of use cases. If that means we need to drop the term CMDB along the way (and leave it for the sole usage of the IT process people), I am more than happy to oblige.

[UPDATE on 2008/01/11: Prof. Milo pointed me to this follow-up paper that proposes a similar looking query language except that this time it is targeted at monitoring process instances rather than analyzing process definitions. And the monitoring runs as a set of BPEL processes within the monitored BPEL engine. Her group is doing some very interesting work.]