Abstract
The integrated management of business processes and master data is being increasingly considered as a fundamental problem, by both the academia and the industry. In this position paper, we focus on the foundations of the problem, arguing that contemporary approaches struggle to find a suitable equilibrium between data- and process-related aspects. We then propose a new formal model, called db-nets, that balances such two pillars through the marriage of colored Petri nets and relational databases. We invite the research community to build on this new model, discussing in particular its potential in conceptual modeling, formal verification, and simulation.