Defining ETL Worfklows using BPMN and BPEL



Decisional systems are crucial for enterprise improvement.

They allow the consolidation of heterogeneous data from

distributed enterprise data stores into strategic indicators.

An essential component of this data consolidation is the Ex-

tract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process. In the research

literature there has been very few work defining conceptual

models for ETL processes. At the same time, there are cur-

rently many tools that manage such processes. However,

each tool uses its own model, which is not necessarily able

to communicate with the models of other tools. In this pa-

per, we propose a platform-independent conceptual model of

ETL processes based on the Business Process Model Nota-

tion (BPMN) standard. We also show how such a conceptual

model can be implemented using Business Process Execu-

tion Language (BPEL), a standard executable language for

specifying interactions with web services.