The Process Interchange Format Project, (PIF)

Critical in Business Process Reengineering or Enterprise Integration is the ability to share and interlink heterogeneous process models. The goal of the PIF (Process Interchange Format) project is to support the exchange of business process models across different formats and schemas. The project pursues this goal by developing PIF (a common translation language that serves as a bridge among heterogeneous process representations), local translators between PIF and local process representations, and a mechanism for extending PIF to accommodate different expressive needs in a modular way (Partially Shared View).

More details can be found in in the interactive HTML version of CCS Working Paper #180, The PIF Process Interchange Format and Framework

The PIF project aims to support translations such that:

• Process descriptions can be automatically translated back and forth between PIF and other process representations with as little loss of meaning as possible. If translation cannot be done fully automatically, the human efforts needed to assist the translation should be minimized. If a translator cannot translate part of a PIF process description to its target format, it should:
  • Translate as much of the description as possible (and not, for example, simply issue an error message and give up)
  • Represent any untranslatable parts so that the translator can add them back to the process description when it is translated back into PIF

The syntax of PIF adopts that of KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format), see (Genesereth & Fikes, 1992 (Available as a Postcript file via anonymous ftp from www-ksl.stanford.edu:/pub/knowledge-sharing/papers/kif.ps)). KIF is a language that has been developed by the Interlingua Working Group, under the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) Knowledge Sharing Initiative (Neches et al., 1991), to facilitate knowledge sharing.

Send your comments, requests or problem reports to:

sbuckley@mit.edu

Last updated January 9, 1995