Workflow and data warehousing taxonomy

The concept of workflow has evolved from the need to automate business processes. Data warehousing represents a need to store large amounts of data from many heterogeneous sources for the purpose of allowing user queries and data mining. This thesis presents a literature review of attributes and concepts generally discussed in conjunction with workflow, workflow management systems, and maintaining a data warehouse. The workflow portion includes relaxed and enhanced transaction models that may be applied to workflow situations. Other models that are not transactional in nature, have been developed to define business scenarios and to provide a foundation for the specification and development of computer software to support processing of these business activities. The data warehouse portion introduces concepts and problems of setting up a data warehouse and in subsequently maintaining its views.