Assigning Declarative Semantics to Some UML Activity Diagrams and BPMN Diagrams

Research problem and research questions: There exist several diagram techniques to represent (business) processes, such as Activity Diagrams and BPMN-diagrams. But what is their formal semantics? Do they have a mathematical declarative semantics? We intend to provide such a semantics. Contribution: We define a mapping from UTIL, a universal textual instruction language template with a formal, declarative semantics, to Activity Diagrams and another mapping from UTIL to BPMN. In this way, we give the generated BPMN and Activity Diagrams a formal, declarative semantics as well. It also provides a basis to study those diagrams and to compare them on a semantic level. It gives an alternative perspective on those diagrams as well.