Changes in business conditions have forced enterprises to continuously re-engineer their business processes. Traditional business process modeling approaches, being activity-centric, have proven to be inadequate for handling this re-engineering. Recent research has focused on developing data-centric business process modeling approaches based on (business) artifacts. However, formal approaches for deriving artifacts out of business requirements currently do not exist. This paper describes a method for artifact discovery and modeling. The method is illustrated with an example in the purchase order domain. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.