Portuguese E-Parliament System as a Case Study of the FloWPASS - Framework to Workflow Process Automation Systems

Abstract

Our main goal is the interrelation amongst the new metadata paradigm-the XML family-and the Workflow Process Automation, and its integration and interaction with database legacy systems. We intend to answer two fundamental subjects: the granularity of XML documents that support the framework, and the cross-reference capacity with other files or databases in a system, being both supported by XML databases. We used TEXTML Server as a back end system for intermediating and recovering information from binary and XML files. In out case study, we implemented a multimedia and heterogeneous distributed system based on Web Services. The main idea in the proposal of the framework was separate the process logic from the application components. For that, we used workflow process management techniques and XML Web Services to the process logic. For the application components we built XML Schemas to generated XML files, indexes for TEXTML Server and XSL files that will be used to format data for each system front-end like PDA's, t hird generation mobile phones (GPRS, UMTS) and personal computers. We are testing a workflow process automation prototype (based on WfMC reference model) to be used in our case study: the information management system of legislative data of the portuguese parliament. All this was embedded in the new Microsoft's platform for software components: the .NET Framework.