Research On Web Service Based Workflow Interoperation

Workflow interoperation is an important issue to realize cross-enterprise/organization cooperation and even virtual enterprise/organization. With the faster pace of economy globalization, the relationship among enterprises/organizations grows more tighter than ever. To meet the need of many business processes which may occur across enterprises/organizations boundaries or even across country boundaries, more and more and more enterprises and organizations begin to construct their own information platforms and move their businesses onto Internet. For this reason, resources and services owned by these enterprises and organizations present new features such as heterogeneity, distribution, dynamic change, loop-coupled cooperation and even autonomy. Under this situation, workflow interoperation is faced with new challenges. To achieve dynamic and loop-coupled interoperation becomes a new research issue in this field.Realization of workflow interoperation needs the support of distribute computing technology. Traditional distribute component object can nicely support tight-coupled applications in the scope of Intranet. When applications spread across Internet, features such as heterogeneity and loop-coupled cooperation appear simultaneously. In this case, the ability of traditional distribute component object to meet the need of these new features is inadequate. Otherwise, when cooperation is brought to Internet, enterprises inevitably are confronted with the problem of how to pick out services as they want from such gigantic resource base that Internet is. Obviously, traditional method of manual selection can't suit this situation. We must adopt a new mechanism which utilizes computer to achieve automatic search and selection of services. We declared that the major contributions of this work lie in the following aspects:We present a scenario which takes web service as the platform for workflow interoperation. In this scenario, service provider releases its workflow interface as a web service, and service consumers start and monitor the workflow via calling provider web service. While web service takes HTTP as transport protocol and XML to describe interoperation message, heterogeneous workflow can achieve loose-coupled interoperation using web service.To realize dynamic finding and invoking of process during workflow interoperation, we adopt semantic web technology to describe workflow web service's semantic feature on the base of above scenario. Meanwhile, we present a semantic based query and match making mechanism. With these efforts, we can achieve automatic search and selection of services.When adopting emerging technologies to enhance the performance of workflow interoperation, we argue that standardization is the key to realize wide application of workflow and its interoperation. For this consideration, in our work we tried our best to keep pace with existing standards.