Artifacts
Artifacts provide a mechanism to capture additional information about a Process, beyond the underlying flow-chart structure.
This information does not directly impact the flow chart characteristics of a Process.
There are three standard Artifacts in BPMN:
• Data Objects: Used to represent the documents and data that are manipulated by Processes.
• Groups: Provide a mechanism to highlight and categorize a section of the model or a set of Objects.
• Text Annotations: Add further descriptive information to a model (as an aid to understanding).