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CoopFlow: A Framework for Inter-organizational Workflow Cooperation

  • Conference paper
On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2005: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE (OTM 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3760))

Abstract

The work we present here is in line with a novel approach for inter-organizational workflow cooperation spanning several organizations without being managed by one physical organization. Our approach consists of three steps: workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection, and workflow cooperation. Hence, to implement a virtual organization it is important to provide a mechanism whereby organizations can advertise their workflow parts, other organizations can look at them and cooperate these with their own workflows. In this paper, we present CoopFlow, a workflow cooperation framework, supporting dynamic plugging and cooperation between heterogeneous workflow management systems (WfMS). Can be connected to CoopFlow any WfMS that is able to invoke external applications (programs, Web services, etc.) and that allows external applications to invoke any step within a workflow it manages. CoopFlow presents many advantages. First, it provides powerful ways for inter-organizational workflow cooperation and code reduction. In fact, partners can change their WfMS without changing the global proxy behaviour. Furthermore, it permits a dynamic interconnection and disconnection of participating organizations. In addition, it preserves the privacy and autonomy of process participants by reducing inter-visibility as tiny as the cooperation needs based on the view principle. Finally, our framework preserves established workflows : participants don’t modify their internal systems. Instead, they have just to implement a proxy to integrate CoopFlow.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, GET/INT, (Institut National des Télécommunications), 9, Rue Charles Fourier, 91011, Evry, France

    Issam Chebbi & Samir Tata

Authors
  1. Issam Chebbi
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  2. Samir Tata
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. STARLab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Bldg G/10, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Robert Meersman

  2. School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, Bld 10.10, 376-392 Swanston Street, 3001, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Zahir Tari

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Chebbi, I., Tata, S. (2005). CoopFlow: A Framework for Inter-organizational Workflow Cooperation. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2005: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE. OTM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3760. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11575771_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11575771_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29736-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32116-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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