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Until quite recently, most of the process models developed for the construction industry used the IDEFØ notation. This was largely due to it's use for developing initial processes within the development of the STEP standard (the ISO 10303 series of standards) and the ease of using it either with readily available software tools or even using pencil and paper. IDEFØ is designed for detailing system activities for function modeling. It was not intended to be used for modeling activity sequences although it has been heavily used for this purpose.

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) provides businesses with the capability of defining and understanding their internal and external business procedures through a Business Process Diagram, which will give organizations the ability to communicate these procedures in a standard manner. It is a standard maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG) with a richer set of capabilities for modelling business process than IDEFØ

A decision was taken early in IDM development to recommend the use of BPMN due to its focussed business process nature, it's ability to link with other XML related standards in the long term (particularly XPDI and BPEL) and the rapidly growing tool support. In particular, it uses 'swimlanes' to enable communication between actors to be visualized. This is not easy to do with IDEFØ but is critical to seeing where exchange requirements are needed in IDM.

A

There is a lot of information available on the Web about BPMN. Just 'Google BPMN' and watch.

Probably the best resource is the actual BPMN standard produced by the Object Management Group. There are also excellent articles and presentations by Stephen White of IBM and a paper from Tibco based on a webinar presentation by Justin Brunt. Links to all of the resources are provided on the IDM Links page