After you imported your model you can search for elements by their id or by the type of element.

StartEvent start = (StartEvent) modelInstance.getModelElementById("start");
// find all elements of the type task
ModelElementType taskType = modelInstance.getModel().getType(Task.class);
Collection<ModelElementInstance> taskInstances = modelInstance.getModelElementsByType(taskType);

You can also access the child elements of an element or references to other elements. For example, a sequence flowreferences a source and a target element while a flow node (like start event, tasks, etc.) has child elementsfor incoming and outgoing sequence flows.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<definitions targetNamespace="http://camunda.org/examples" xmlns="http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/20100524/MODEL">
  <process id="process-with-one-task">
    <startEvent id="start">
    </startEvent>
    <userTask id="task1">
      <incoming>start-task1</incoming>
      <outgoing>task1-end</outgoing>
    </userTask>
    <endEvent id="end">
      <incoming>task1-end</incoming>
    </endEvent>
    <sequenceFlow id="start-task1" sourceRef="start" targetRef="task1"/>
  </process>
</definitions>

You can now use the BPMN model API to get the source and target flow node of the sequence flow with the ID start-task1.

public Collection<FlowNode> getFlowingFlowNodes(FlowNode node) {
  Collection<FlowNode> followingFlowNodes = new ArrayList<FlowNode>();
  for (SequenceFlow sequenceFlow : node.getOutgoing()) {
    followingFlowNodes.add(sequenceFlow.getTarget());
  }
  return followingFlowNodes;
}