Delft, The Netherlands Edited by:

There is an urgent need for a reference conceptual framework regarding the understanding of business processes based on the Language-Action Perspective (LAP). Several frameworks have been proposed in the past years, but they appear to differ in several important aspects, and none of them is widely accepted yet. This paper intends to contribute to the establishment of such a framework. It does so by reviewing two frameworks that are in use within the LAP-community. Because of a lack of sufficient clarity and formality of the published descriptions, no definite conclusions could be drawn. An alternative framework is proposed that comprises as much as possible of these frameworks and at the same time seeks for more clarity, simplicity and rigor.