Views for Inter-organization Workflow in an E-commerce Environment

This paper proposes the use of workflowViews as a fundamental support for workflow inter-operability and for visibility by external parties and presents taxonomy of workflow views.

Abstract

In an e-commerce or e-service environment, workflow involves not only a single organization but also a number of business partners. Workflow inter-operability is therefore an important issue for workflow enactment in such an environment. In this paper, we propose the use of workflow views as a fundamental support for workflow inter-operability and for visibility by external parties. We present taxonomy of workflow views, discuss various components of a workflow view, and their semantics with example usage. We also demonstrate how contracts can be facilitated with a supply-chain example.