Workflow and web service standards

Abstract

Workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) standards would greatly help workplaces by allowing multiple systems to be easily integrated. Such standards have been under development for a long time, resulting in what seem to be very few real results. There are number of reasons why these standards seem like they can be developed quickly, but in practice they are rather difficult to agree upon. It reminds me of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project which was hoped to solve the few remaining unsolved barriers to artificial intelligence-in the summer of 1955 [6]. Almost half a century later true AI still eludes us. This is surprising only because intelligence (the natural kind) seems to come so easily to us. Similarly, business processes (the natural kind) seem so easy to us that the lack of standards seems unreasonable. There are a number of reasons for this, but before discussing the inherent difficulties, let's start with a quick overview of the history and the current status.

RESTful Web service composition with BPEL for REST

“…In this paper, we provide explicit language support to control which parts of a process are published through a similar kind of API. Also, the idea of publishing a ''link to a process instance" [44] can be traced back to the Simple Workflow Access Protocol (SWAP [45]), originally proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) in 1998. More recently, the idea of mapping the state of a workflow instance to a ''resource"-like abstraction, as defined by the WS-Resource Framework has been explored in [46].…”

Business Process Management Systems – Enabling Continuous Improvement in Industrial Services

“…BPMS are also capable of maintaining larger repositories of hierarchical processes, managing quick process modifications as well as handling flexibly special cases, providing a potential mechanism for managing crossorganizational service business processes. [20], [21], [22], [23] The generally stated benefits achieved by implementing a BPMS businesses processes include enhanced process efficiency and control through automated workflow coordination, improved process quality and customer service, increased agility and responsiveness through ability to modify process models flexibly, better process visibility and overall process understanding, consistent means for monitoring, analyzing and redesigning business processes, smooth integration of BPMS with legacy and new systems. [2], [4], [13], [15], [17], [20], [24, [25, [26, [27]…”