# TransformingBPMN Processes toSBVR Process Rules with
## 1 Introduction  
Despite all the efforts of OMG to make Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) (OMG, 2013) a graphical language that could be read and understood equally by both IT and business people, the latter still lean toward the natural language specifications; this is especially true when it comes to documenting and validating business process models [1, 2, 3, 4]. Better yet is to have both graphical and textual representations of business knowledge, because people might have different preferences towards process representation formats depending on the application purpose and the cognitive style of an individual himself [5, 6]. This implies that graphical business process models should have unambiguous representation in natural language as well. In other words, there is an actual need for a solution that could support different kinds of visualizations (namely graphical and natural language-based) of business process models and beyond. Such a solution would be beneficial to all interested parties in any information systems development (ISD) effort, i.e., actual process participants who take part in real-world business activities, business analysts who model and analyze business processes, and system developers who develop computerized information systems supporting those business processes. We put this business process model representation objective into a larger context, which is the development of solutions integrating various perspectives of business modeling and platform-independent modeling under the unified framework of OMG's Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) [7]. This is a long-term research initiative carried out by the researchers at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) together with their respected partners in various research and development (R&D) projects, such as VeTIS (\"Business Rule Solutions for Information Systems Development\", 2007-2009), funded by the High Technology Development Program, Lithuanian State Science and Studies Foundation, and VEPSEM (\"Integration of Business Processes and Business Rules on the Basis of Business Semantics\", 2013-2015), funded by the European Social Fund (ESF). One of the main areas of our research in this domain is the integration of formally sound natural language-based business vocabularies and business rules with business processes. It is widely acknowledged that business processes and business rules are tightly related to each other. Yet, the actual integration of these two major aspects of business knowledge has not been explicitly defined by OMG in their respective standards, namely BPMN and Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) [8]. There is no direct referencing to SBVR, nor its concepts in any context in the latest version of BPMN. At the same time in SBVR, they mention business processes only once by saying that \"... a metamodel of a business process can import the SBVR XMI Metamodel package to relate processes to rules, or for modeling semantic formulations of rules that govern processes.\" It should be made clear that OMG does acknowledge the existence of direct or indirect relationships among business processes and other business modeling aspects, such as business rules models; however, these relationships are yet to be \"... defined more formally as BPMN and other specifications are advanced\" [9]. In other words, the integration of OMG standards that define various aspects of business models, as well as information systems design, remains a prerogative of the international research community. In this paper, we focus on one of the aspects of the integration of business processes with business vocabularies and business rules, specifically the transformation of BPMN processes to structured natural language-based process rules, which is a kind of behavioral business rules, expressed in SBVR. In that way, the natural language-based representation of business processes is well-aligned with the already existing business vocabularies and business rules of the same business domain.