Sorry, but I have no knowledge of how drools workitems are configured/created/used in their 'GPD' etc (Drools 'workflow' is not something that is supported by JBoss), so But besides this, I'm not completely sure what you mean by anonymous wrote : I did a quick scan about the pvm-documentation but I realized that XML-Processing is made by each implementing api, which implicates that this document didn't help me to map such nodes to a common type .... so if my comment below is not related, please shoot :-) You are right in looking at the pvm documentation for extending jPDL 4. Adding new element types is possible this way but indeed not by 'mapping' them to an existing common node type by using e.g. an attribute value instead of an element name. Might be an interesting addition though. Aamof, the BPMN2 implementation on top of the pvm could use something like this as well. The editor is a different story. With new (user defined) element names it is harder to extend than the runtime engine, but not completely impossible. Using attributes would make it a little easier. With regard to your 40 days, I think it is very well possible to extend the existing jPDL (maybe even the pvm) and the GPD to support large parts of this (contributions always welcome, with 'support' from our side in return ;-) ) If you want to go this way, discussing this in the dev forum is a good thing to do. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4253296#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...