1. Workflow Breakout GOG2 13/6/02

2. Some Thoughts There is a need to be able to follow what is going on with OGSA services (esp. for commercial entities), e.g. tracking data flow through applications. This complicated problem may have an overlap with mobile phone companies (accounting and billing problems) Complex system make people nervous about adopting grid tech. Being able to understand workflow helps with these political issues.

3. More Thoughts When you are using many services together, you must be able to still enforce a policy (e.g. regarding confidential data not going outside your firewall). Service providers will also have policies. Need a way to define and enforce these. Existing tools are WSFL and XLang. Are these good enough for OGSA? Good tracking of actual workflow is required for good logging, accounting, and debugging when things go wrong. Tools are needed to help people understand and identify hotspots in workflow. Simulating or replaying a workflow would be useful.

4. Questions 1.What do we want from workflow? 2.Who is the workflow for? (user, service provider, etc.) 3.OGSA is more dynamic than web services, with factories etc. So workflow could be a lot more complex than for web services. Would existing technologies cope, or do we need something new? 4.What does the B2B world do about workflow?