The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) has made available the first public draft of a specification aimed at providing a standard way to model business processes across heterogeneous systems both inside and beyond the firewall.

BPML (Business Process Modeling Language) 1.0 is an XML Schema that defines a formal model for expressing business processes that represent a range of enterprise activities including transactions, data management, concurrency, exception handling, and operational semantics, according to officials at BPMI.org.

The specification is intended to work in concert with the recently proposed WSCI spec, which would allow developers to "choreograph" events and transactions that take place between systems when applications and services are accessed over the Internet.

BPML 1.0's role would be to model business processes into standard, private implementations that sport WSCI-defined public interfaces, officials said.

"By fully leveraging the emerging Web services stack, BPML 1.0 paves the way for a new era of business process management where processes, people, and information can be unified into agile business systems," said Ismael Ghalimi, chairman of BPMI.org and chief strategy office at Intalio Inc., in a written statement.

Intalio is one of 16 founding members of BPMI, which also include such companies as Aventail Corp., VerticalNet Inc., Bowstreet Software Inc., and Verve.

BPML 1.0 is available for download at www.bpmi.org/bpml-spec.esp.