| Web service based workflows provide support for aggregating web services into new higher-level web services, but do not support direct interaction with people. On the other hand, traditional collaboration tools like email or instant messaging do not provide the necessary support for structured business processes. In addition, building or modifying new workflow application with current software tools is expensive and time consuming since it requires customized programming process for the presentation, validations, and required business logic.; We introduce Lynx, a new architecture for workflow systems based on Web Services that leverages on current standards and broadly known technologies such as XML, e-mail, BPEL and XForms, to reduce the amount of code and thus the cost and time of developing and maintaining a Web-based workflow application, and interact with human partners via e-mail based forms without requiring a specialized client. We illustrate the usefulness Lynx in a Digital Government scenario. |
