Conceptual Modeling of Workflows

Workkow management is emerging as a challenging area for databases, stressing database technology beyond its current capabilities. Workkow management systems need to be more integrated with data management technology, in particular as it concerns the access to external databases. Thus, a convergence between workkow management and databases is occurring. In order to make such convergence eeective, however, it is required to improve and strengthen the speciication of workkows at the conceptual level, by formalizing within a unique model their \internal behavior" (e.g. interaction and cooperation between tasks), their relationship to the environment (e.g. the assignment of work task to agents) and the access to external databases. The conceptual model presented in this paper is a basis for achieving convergence of workkows and databases; the workkow description language being used combines the speciication of workkows with accesses to external databases. We brieey indicate how the conceptual model presented in this paper is suitable for being supported by means of active rules on workkow-speciic data structures. We foresee an immediate application of this conceptual model to workkow interoperability.