BPMN - a close family

I have always considered BMPN (Business Process Modelling Notation) to be the 'best' language in its domain - very expressive and well thought out, able to describe real world situations without using strange hacks and without oversimplification. However, I have never thought about implementing it in NGinn - full BPMN 1.1 implementation seemed too complex to be an open-source project objective, especially single-person project.

So I have turned to less complex ideas after reading a bit about YAWL and decided to implement similar language for .Net. But it turns out that YAWL (and NGinn as a consequence) use very similar concepts that can be found in BPMN. That's because all of them are all based on Petri nets, but differ in everything that was added over basic Petri-net specification. For example, BPMN defines several control structures based on non-local events, such as errors (exception handling), compensation and cancellation - quite useful. NGinn has no special constructs for exception handling and no notion of compensating. But when we analyze what 'workflow patterns' can be imlemented in these languages, it turns out that there are no patterns in BPMN that could not be implemented in NGinn or YAWL. It's only a matter of convenience - for example, error handling or compensating is easy to do in BPMN and not so obvious in NGinn (custom logic required). Maybe a material for 2.0 version.

Here's a link to a very nice website about BPMN - Dive Into BPM. Enjoy the dive!