Coordinating work on the Web with workspaces

Abstract

Workflow management systems focus on coordinating work that is situated in the real world. A strong trend towards combining workflow and Internet technologies has recently evolved. Workspaces combine coordination technology and standard Internet technology to exhibit various benefits of explicit procedure representation, distributed and uncoupled architecture and ease of access. Its architecture is based on workflows as coordinated transformations of documents. Basic steps transform XML documents under the control of an XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) engine. Coordination operations affect the order of execution in the workflow. Finally, a meta-step compiles a workflow graph represented in the XML-based Workspace Coordinated Language (WSCL) into a set of XSL rules for single transformation steps. Workspaces uses a Linda-like data space for coordination via XML documents.