BPMN stands for Business Process Modeling Notation. It is maintained by Object Management Group (OMG), also known as Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI). BPMN enables stakeholders to graphically represent business processes from process initiation stage to final stage.
The main goal of BPMN is to model the business process in a manner that is easily understood by developers, business analysts, process owners and business users. It combines the advantages of text based, event based and graphical notations based business modeling languages.
BPMN consists of four basic categories – Flow Objects (Events, Activities, Gateways), Artifacts (Data Object, Group), Connecting Objects (Sequence Flow, Message Flow, Association) and Swimlanes (Pool, Lanes). A brief explanation of these four categories is presented here:
