This project is developing a new foundation for workflow and business
process management, called the "artifact-based semantic workflow
model", and working in this context to develop new theoretical
results, techniques and algorithms for specifying, designing,
evolving, and implementing workflows. The new foundation is based
on two fundamental premises. The first is to use the
artifact-based approach to workflow pioneered at IBM
Research. This approach is data-centric rather than
process-centric, and allows to structure workflows according to
the desired life-cycle of key business artifacts (or entities)
that are manipulated by a workflow. The second premise is to use
techniques from semantic web services to enable the declarative
specification of workflows based on the semantics of the workflow
services (or tasks) to be performed and underlying goals of the
business managers. This is fundamentally different from most
current approaches to workflow specification, which are
procedural. A major thrust of the proposed research is to
develop technical results (e.g., techniques, algorithms, and tools) to
enable the automated construction of workflows, starting from from
a specification of the artifacts to be manipulated, the individual
services that might be applied to them, and a goal to be achieved
(expressed using a logic formula rather than as a flowchart).
More information can be found from the project web page
(http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~su/NSF/0812578).