Views for inter-organization workflow in an E-commerce environment

Abstract

In an e-commerce or e-service environment, workflow involves not only a single organization but also a number of business partners. Workflow interoperability is therefore an important issue for workflow enactment in such an environment. In this paper, we propose the use of workflow views as a fundamental support for workflow inter-operability and for visibility by external parties. We present taxonomy of workflow views, discuss various components of a workflow view, and their semantics with example usage. We also demonstrate how contracts can be facilitated with a supply-chain example. © 2003 by International Federation for Information Processing.