Coordination Technology for Workflows on the Web: Workspaces

Abstract

The need for coordination technology in Web applications is evident. It has been shown that Linda-like systems are a suited to facilitate the interaction amongst agents and processes over the Internet. Workspaces is the application of Linda-like coordination technology to the domain of Internet-based workflow management systems.

The Workspaces architecture is based on workflows as coordinated transformations of documents. A set of basic steps transform XML documents under the control of an XSL engine. Coordination operations affect the order of execution in the workflow. A meta step compiles a workflow graph from the XML-based Workspaces Coordination Language into a set of XSL rules for single transformation steps.

The Workspaces architecture uses a Linda-like data space for coordination by XML documents. This XMLSpace contains documents describing the steps in a workflow and application specific documents to be transformed in the course of work. It involves multiple matching relations on XML documents.

The combination of standard Internet technology with coordination technology exhibits various benefits of explicit procedure representation, distributed and uncoupled architecture and ease of access.