The idea behind BPMN Version 2.0 is to provide a standard way to both represent the visual structure of a business process and its execution semantic, all in the same file, while also providing a mapping between both. This way, the gap between business analysts drawing a new business process and the business process actually running in an execution environment is significantly reduced. This also provides a common ground for technical people and business people to share ideas. The purpose of this chapter, and of the BPMN standard, is to make process diagrams (such as the following diagram), something that can be easily read and understood by different groups of people:

The standard was formally released in January 2011, and it is a result of the collaboration between companies such as Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, Intalio, and many others within the Object Management Group (OMG). They combine almost 20 years of business process standardization experience in this standard....