A dynamic warehouse for XML Data of the Web.

Abstract

The growth of the Internet and the Web is revolutionizing the way companies interact with their suppliers, partners, and clients, by enabling a substantial automation of the full spectrum of their business activities. As we move into the 21st century economy, the primary form of automation will be B2B e-commerce, in which enterprises interact with each other through entirely automated means. As an example, consider an electronic market place in a vertical industry segment, in which suppliers and buyers tie into a common IT infrastructure to exchange goods and services. This forms a supply chain in which buyers need (a) to investigate possible suppliers, (b) to check the terms and conditions under which suppliers can do business, (c) to interoperate with the suppliers enterprise support systems, i.e., workflows, and (d) to monitor ordering/purchasing for possible delays, unexpected events, react to such events, etc. This paper presents an original framework for specifying, enacting and supervising e-services on the Web. This framework is based on XML and rules-based support for products/services description and workflow mediation across organizations. Traditionally, WorkFlow Management Systems (WFMS) have focused on homogeneous and centrally controlled environments for binding people and processes within the boundary of a single organization. In the context of B2B e-commerce, WFMSs need to support collaboration between various autonomous parties, some of which may even have conflicting business goals. More precisely, they must cope with heterogeneous enterprise support environments (e.g., through different WF systems), to model the interaction of independent partners by abstracting the internal details of their activities (e.g., through different WF schemas), and finally to facilitate flexible linking and monitoring of inter-enterprise processes (e.g., through different WF enactments). To address these challenges we are currently developing a workflow mediation middleware which relies on three basic technologies: (a) the XRL workflow specification language [13, 18] for representing in XML heterogeneous workflow schemas and enactments, (b) an XML query language [4, 5] for manipulating both complex product and service descriptions, and (c) the Vortex rule-based language [12, 6] that supports heuristic reasoning in order to take on-line business decisions during the workflow execution. During recent years, workflow interoperation has received considerable attention. Numerous research projects and prototypes have been proposed [16, 2] while basic interoperability between various vendor WFMSs has been a subject of standardization efforts by the Object Management Group (see Workflow