1. Workflow Terminology, Standards, and Requirements
Part one, terminology

2. Topics What is workflow? What domains does it cover?
What is its relationship to middleware?
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3. Workflow history
When “computer” meant a person that performed a series of computations (WWII)
1970s when paper based processes were duplicated in IT systems
Bletchley Park (?) used 100s of people to perform piecemeal computations in an attempt to break German cryptography and communications. This may be the earliest example of “scientific” workflow.
The work in the 1970s can be viewed as the document centric model, even though the “document centric model” of computing had not been coined.
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4. A definition
The workflow paradigm provides the ability to orchestrate a series of actions constrained by rules. Unlike other paradigms it also provides tracking or tracing, and flexible flow control.
The workflow paradigm also supports state persistence over a relatively long period of time.
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5. Workflow Application Domains
Business
Often document centric
Marshalling task executions
Examples:
Processing travel vouchers, purchase orders
Grant proposal submission
Scientific
Marshalling multiple data formats interacting with multiple interconnected tools
Examples:
Bioinformatics
Cheminformatics
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6. Workflow and Middleware
Thesis 1: To extend the workflow paradigm across multiple systems, the activity processing must interact with authentication, authorization and directory services, hopefully provided by an existing middleware infrastructure.
Thesis 2: Workflow can be used to facilitate the management of IdM and AuthZM systems.
The ability to discover, and reference, the relationships between people and systems is critical. Directory services may be used to facilitate this.
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7. Some Common Terminology
Rules
Activities
Chains
Loops
Forward chaining
Runtime transparency
Tracking, tracing, status monitoring
Flexible flow control
Forward chaining – allows atomic riules to be assembled into rulesets without the definition of, or necessarily even the knowledge of, the dependencies among the rules.
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