To satisfy additional modeling concepts that are not part of the basic set of flow elements (activities and transitions), BPMN provides the concept of Artifacts that can be linked to the existing Activity object through Associations. Thus, Artifacts do not affect the basic sequence flow, nor do they affect mappings to execution languages.Artifacts are used to show additional information about a Process that is not directly related to its sequence flow.
At this point, BPMN provides three standard Artifacts: A Data Object, a Group, and an Annotation. TWE currently allows you to use the first two types of artifacts.
An Artifact is a graphical object that provides supporting information about the Process or elements within the Process. However, as mentioned, it does not directly affect the flow of the Process. BPMN provides a specific graphical representation for the different artifacts:
Table 6.19. Artifact attributes
Name | M/O | Description |
---|---|---|
Name | O | Name of the artifact. |
ArtifactType | M | DataObject | Group | Annotation |
TextAnnotation | O | Visible textual description. |
DataObject | O | When artifact is DataObject type, it describes other attributes of an artifact. |
In BPMN, a Data Object is considered an Artifact because it does not have any direct affect on the sequence flow of the Process, but it does provide information about what the Process does. That is, how documents, data, and other objects are used and updated during the Process. While the name - Data Object may imply an electronic document, it can be used to represent many different types of objects, both electronic and physical.
As an Artifact, Data Objects generally will be associated with activities. An Association will be used to make the connection between the Data Object and the Flow Object. This means that the behavior of the Process can be modeled without Data Objects for modelers who want to reduce clutter. The same Process can be modeled with Data Objects for modelers who want to include more information without changing the basic behavior of the Process.
The following is a sample of process modeled with an artifact showing the information about the document flowing from one activity to another:
The following table shows the picture of how the graph represents different XPDL artifact type:
![]() | Data object artifact. |
![]() | Text annotation artifact. |
Icons for inserting
different types of artifacts from the graph toolbox are
The picture on the right shows property panel for defining artifact properties. | ![]() |