1. A system comprising one or more computer systems and further comprising: one or more memories that contain one or more flow diagrams, each flow diagram having one or more drawings; one or more flow graphs stored in the memory and having been interpreted from the flow diagram, each of the flow graphs having one or more nodes and one or more edges, each edge connecting two of the nodes; one or more processors coupled to the one or more memories and operative to perform a process modeling validation process comprising the steps of: identifying one or more structural errors in one or more drawings of one or more flow diagrams, the structural errors causing one or more interpretation difficulties in an automatic interpretation of at least one of the flow diagrams, wherein the step of identifying the one or more structural errors includes a flow syntax validation process comprising: parsing one or more of the flow diagrams into a set of one or more diagram elements; filtering the diagram elements to discover a filtered flow graph with a set of nodes and a set of candidate edges from the diagram elements; identifying errors in the filtered flow graph, and for each identified error, providing a fix description; annotating one or more of the nodes and edges with process semantics following a set of process annotation rules to create a semantically annotated flow graph; comparing one or more components of the flow diagram and the corresponding semantically annotated flow graph to a set of rules defined by a business process modeling standard; and providing a set of the semantic errors describing faulty parts of the drawing that do not comply with the business process modeling standard; the one or more processors being further operative to perform: a process modeling repair process comprising the steps of: repairing the structural errors found in order to enable the automatic interpretation of the flow diagram; and repairing the semantic errors to make the flow diagram and its corresponding semantically annotated flow graph comply with the business process modeling standard.
1. A system comprising one or more computer systems and further comprising: one or more memories that contain one or more flow diagrams, each flow diagram having one or more drawings; one or more flow graphs stored in the memory and having been interpreted from the flow diagram, each of the flow graphs having one or more nodes and one or more edges, each edge connecting two of the nodes; one or more processors coupled to the one or more memories and operative to perform a process modeling validation process comprising the steps of: identifying one or more structural errors in one or more drawings of one or more flow diagrams, the structural errors causing one or more interpretation difficulties in an automatic interpretation of at least one of the flow diagrams, wherein the step of identifying the one or more structural errors includes a flow syntax validation process comprising: parsing one or more of the flow diagrams into a set of one or more diagram elements; filtering the diagram elements to discover a filtered flow graph with a set of nodes and a set of candidate edges from the diagram elements; identifying errors in the filtered flow graph, and for each identified error, providing a fix description; annotating one or more of the nodes and edges with process semantics following a set of process annotation rules to create a semantically annotated flow graph; comparing one or more components of the flow diagram and the corresponding semantically annotated flow graph to a set of rules defined by a business process modeling standard; and providing a set of the semantic errors describing faulty parts of the drawing that do not comply with the business process modeling standard; the one or more processors being further operative to perform: a process modeling repair process comprising the steps of: repairing the structural errors found in order to enable the automatic interpretation of the flow diagram; and repairing the semantic errors to make the flow diagram and its corresponding semantically annotated flow graph comply with the business process modeling standard. 9. A system, as in claim 1 , where the process modeling repair process further creates a precise definition of a flow graph implicit in a flow diagram, which has one or more nodes and one or more edges that each correspond to one or more shapes in the flow diagram.