3.3 Information Artifacts

  • Functional perspective = What activities should happen in the process.
    • Control-flow perspective = When activities and events should occur.
    • Data perspective = Which information artifacts (documents/files) are required to perform an activity or are produced as result of performing an activity.
  • Data objects = Represents information flowing in and out of activities.
    • Can be: Physical and digital artifacts such as: invoice, paper letter, email, file.
    • Displayed as: A document with the upper-right corner folded over.
      • ex. Invoice under Emit invoice.
    • Allows to model the information flow between process activities.
    • To avoid cluttering the model, a data object may be repeated multiple times.
    • When a data object (1 or more) is an input the activity will proceed when all the data objects becomes available.
    • Short notation for a data object being passed on to another activity, is by connecting it to the sequence flow line.
      • ex. Shipment address between Get shipment address and Ship product.
    • State of a data object
      • Note the state behind the name of the data object between [].
      • ex. Purchase order [confirmed] under Receive payment.
  • Data association = Displays the association between a activity and a data object.
    • Can be: An input (arrowhead to activity) or an output (arrowhead to data object).
    • Displayed as: Dotted line with an open arrowhead.
    • ex. output from activity: Invoice under emit Invoice.
    • ex. input to activity: Purchase order under Confirm Order.
  • Data store = Contains data objects that need to be kept beyond the duration of a process instance.
    • Can be: A electronic database, filing cabinet.
    • Displayed as: Empty cylinder with triple upper border.
    • Connected via data association.
    • ex. Warehouse DB under Check stock availability.
  • Text annotations = Adds additional information to the object/acivity they are connected to.
    • Displayed as: [ in which the text is written connected with an dotted line to the object/activity.
    • Provides extra information to make the model more clear.
    • Do not affect the flow of tokens trough the process model.
    • ex. Also includes packaging above Ship product.