Abstract
Workflow management is emerging as a challenging area for databases, stressing database technology beyond its current capabilities. Workflow management systems need to be more integrated with data management technology, in particular as it concerns the access to external databases. Thus, a convergence between workflow management and databases is occurring.
In order to make such convergence effective, however, it is required to improve and strengthen the specification of workflows at the conceptual level, by formalizing within a unique model their “internal behavior” (e.g. interaction and cooperation between tasks), their relationship to the environment (e.g. the assignment of work task to agents) and the access to external databases.
The conceptual model presented in this paper is a basis for achieving convergence of workflows and databases; the workflow description language being used combines the specification of workflows with accesses to external databases. We briefly indicate how the conceptual model presented in this paper is suitable for being supported by means of active rules on workflow-specific data structures. We foresee an immediate application of this conceptual model to workflow interoperability.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ansari M., Ness L., Rusinkiewicz M., Sheth A., Using Flexible Transations to Support Multi-system Telecomunication Applications, Proc. 18th VLDB Conf., Vancouver, B.C., CAN, 1992.
Attie P., Singh M., Sheth A., Rusinkiewicz M., Specifying and Enforcing Intertask Dependencies, Proc. 19th VLDB Conf., Dublin, Ireland, 1993.
Bandinelli S., Fuggetta A., Ghezzi C., Software Process Model Evolution in the SPADE Environment, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, December 1993.
Bracchi G., Pernici B., The Design Requirements of Office Systems, ACM Trans. on Office Information Systems, 2(2), April 1984.
Casati F., Ceri S., Pernici B., Pozzi G., Conceptual Modeling of Workflows, Internal Report n. 95.018, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy, 1995. The document can also be retrieved by ftp://xerox.elet.polimi.it/pub/papers/WF/InternalReport95_018.ps.
Crespi-Reghizzi S., Psaila G., Federal Grammars and Modular Compilers, Internal Report n. 93.054, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy, 1993.
Dayal U., Hsu M., Ladin R., Organizing Long-running Activities with Triggers and Transactions, Proc. ACM SIGMOD, 1990.
Ellis C., Nutt G., Modeling and Enactment of Workflow Systems, in Application and Theory of Petri Nets, 1993, M. Ajmone Marsan Ed., Lecture Notes in Computer Science 691, New York: Springer Verlag, 1993.
Ellis S., Keddara K. and Rozenberg G., “Dynamic Change within Workflow Systems”, ACM Conf. on Organizational Computing Systems (COOCS 95), 1995.
Forst A., Kuhn E., Bukhres O., General Purpose Workflow Languages, Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 3, n. 2, April 1995.
Georgakopoulos D., Hornick M., Sheth A., An Overview of Workflow Management: from Process Modeling to Workflow Automation Infrasctructure, Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 3, n. 2, April 1995.
Gonzales-Quel A., Gonzales S., Perez M., IDEA Technology Assessment Based on WorkFlow Applications. The Royal Life Application, IDEA Report IDEA.DE.21S.001.01, November 1994.
Hewlet Packard Company, Workflow Module Programming Guide, Palo Alto, Ca, July 1994.
Hsu M. (ed.), Special Issue on Worflow and Extended Transaction Systems, Data Engineering Bulletin, 16(2), June 1993.
Krishnakumar N., Sheth A., Managing Heterogeneous Multi-system Tasks to Support Enterprise-wide Operations, Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 3, n. 2, April 1995.
Rusinkiewicz M., Sheth A., Specification and Execution of Transaction Workflows, in Modern Database Systems: the Object Model, Interoperability, and beyond, Kim W. (ed.), Addison-Wesley, 1994.
Sheth A., Rusinkiewicz M., On Transactional Workflows, Data Engineering Bulletin, 16(2), June 1993.
Stonebraker M., The Integration of Rule Systems and Database Systems, IEEE TKDE, 4(5), October 1992.
Widom J., Ceri S., Active Database Systems, Morgan-Kaufmann, San Mateo, Ca, May 1995.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Pernici, B., Pozzi, G. (1995). Conceptual modeling of workflows. In: Papazoglou, M.P. (eds) OOER '95: Object-Oriented and Entity-Relationship Modeling. ER 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1021. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0020545
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0020545
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60672-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48527-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive