Workflow

About: Workflow is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 31996 publications have been published within this topic receiving 498339 citations.

Method and system for producing an electronic business network

Abstract: An electronic commerce network that facilitates the exchange of goods and services is described that includes configurations for physically implementing the system and data structures for logically implementing the method. The physical components of the system include a wide area network, a message bus (5006), data channels and system connectors (5004). The logical components of the system include system software, client application software, databases and an event coordinator/workflow processor (5011). Functions of the system include business network registration (5008), user registration, definition of roles, assignment of roles to business networks and user registrants, definition of logical products, definition of physical products, identification of the goods needed by a participant, identification of the goods offered by a participant and the brokering of a solution that takes into account the needs of one participant and the offer of another participant.

Temporal Reasoning in Workflow Systems

Abstract: In a workflow system, autonomous agents perform various activities cooperatively to complete a common task. Successful completion of the task often depends on correct synchronization and scheduling of agents' activities. It would greatly enhance the capabilities of current workflow systems if quantitative temporal constraints on the duration of activities and their synchronization requirements can be specified and reasoned about. This paper investigates such requirements and related reasoning algorithms. In particular, the paper studies the consistency, prediction and enactment services in a workflow system, and provides corresponding algorithms. The consistency service is to ensure that the specification of the temporal constraints is possible to satisfys the prediction service is to foretell the time frame for the involved activitiess and the enactment service is to schedule the activities so that, as long as each agent starts and finishes its task within the specified time period, the overall constraints will always be satisfied. For the enactment service, the paper identifies two practically interesting families of enactment schedules for autonomous agents, namely “free schedules” and “restricted due-time schedules”. In a free schedule, an agent may use any amount of time to finish the task as long as it is between the minimum and maximum time declared by the agent when the workflow is designed. A restricted due-time schedule is a more restrictive one in which the maximum amount of time that an agent may use is limited to a smaller number than the declared maximum. The paper presents efficient algorithms to find free and restricted due-time schedules. The paper also provides algorithms for the above services when multiple time granularities are involved in the temporal constraint specification.

Process descriptions as organisational accounting devices: the dual use of workflow technologies

Abstract: Workflow technologies present a problem for CSCW. On the one hand, they are perhaps the most successful form of groupware technology in current use; but on the other, they have been subject to sustained and cogent critiques, particularly from perspective of the analysis of everyday working activities. This leads inevitably to the question: in the face of these critiques, just why and how do work-flow technologies prove effective? This paper suggests that part of the solution lies in the fact that workflow technologies play more than one role in organisations, and that, in fact, the success of work flow technologies may have little to do with the typical relationship of those technologies to the accomplishment of everyday work. On the basis of the notion of a dual role for workflow technologies, I lay out a framework for considering the design and analysis of workflow systems that may help to bridge between these two roles.

FirebrowseR: an R client to the Broad Institute's Firehose Pipeline.

Abstract: With its Firebrowse service (http://firebrowse.org/) the Broad Institute is making large-scale multi-platform omics data analysis results publicly available through a Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programmable Interface (API). Querying this database through an API client from an arbitrary programming environment is an essential task, allowing other developers and researchers to focus on their analysis and avoid data wrangling. Hence, as a first result, we developed a workflow to automatically generate, test and deploy such clients for rapid response to API changes. Its underlying infrastructure, a combination of free and publicly available web services, facilitates the development of API clients. It decouples changes in server software from the client software by reacting to changes in the RESTful service and removing direct dependencies on a specific implementation of an API. As a second result, FirebrowseR, an R client to the Broad Institute’s RESTful Firehose Pipeline, is provided as a working example, which is built by the means of the presented workflow. The package’s features are demonstrated by an example analysis of cancer gene expression data. Database URL: https://github.com/mariodeng/