# Spreadsheets as Interoperability Solution for Business Process Representation
## 6 Evaluation
### Interchange Solution  
Currently, there are several interchange formats between different Business Process Modelling (BPM) techniques. Most are based on XML and have different properties [35]. The below summary presents an overview of the commonly used formats:  
* BPEL4 WS (Business Process Execution Language) also known as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) is an OASIS standard executable language using web services for specifying actions within business processes. It is referred to as an interchange format only via an XML Schema [36]. * BPML (Business Process Modeling Language is an language for business process modeling based on XML [37]. * BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) offers two XML formats for storing BPMN processes: a format defined using XML Schema Definition (XSD) and a format defined using XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) [38]. * BPSS (Business Process Specification Schema) includes a metamodel and XML Schema for Web Service choreography. It works on ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language) [39]. * EPML (Event-Driven Process Chain Markup Language) is XML-based interchange format for event-driven process chains [40]. OWL-S (OWL-Services) is an ontology of services represented in OWL (Ontology Web Language) and builds on an (input-output-preconditions-effects) quadruple to describe services [41]. * PNML (Petri Net Markup Language) is an XML interchange format for Petri net models and for High-level Petri nets in particular. The PNML is currently under the final ballot as ISO/IEC Standard 15909-2 [42; 43]. UML 2 Activity Diagram (Activity Diagrams of Unified Modeling Language can be exchanged using XMI [44]. * WSCDL (W3C's Web Service Choreography Description Language) is a choreography language that describes peer-to-peer collaborations of participants by defining their common and complementary observable behaviors from a global viewpoint [45]. * WSCI (W3C's Web Service Choreography Interface) is focused on the choreography of Web services and provides a set of extensions to WSDL in order to describe process behavior of message exchanges [46]. * WSCL (Web Service Conversation Language) allows defining the abstract interfaces of web services, i.e., the business level conversations or public processes supported by a web service and specifies the XML documents being exchanged [47]. * WSFL (Web Services Flow Language) is an XML language, provided by IMB, for the description of Web Services compositions where control flow is modelled via directed Graphs [48]. * XLANG (Web Services for Business Process Design) provided by Microsoft, is a block-structured language which a strict nesting of control flow blocks is used to structure business processes [49; 50]. * XPDL (XML Process Definition Language is a format standardized by the Workflow Management Coalition to interchange business process definitions between different modeling tools, BPM suites, workflow engines and other software applications [51]. The spreadsheet is compared with other BPM interchange formats in Table 16. Our goal in this comparison is to show the place of spreadsheet-based representation in supporting common process elements. Plus and minus signs denote if a particular structure or element is supported (or not) by the interchange formats mentioned above. As one can observe, some interchange formats support more elements, constructs or objects. However, these representation often require from user much knowledge about the process modeling and the particular notation. Moreover, each of these solutions has some limitations, e.g., BPEL4 WS supports block-structured constructs, so the translation of unstructured acyclic fragments of process models to BPEL4 WS is a very complex task and such a model can be illegible.