Deriving Active Rules for Workflow Enactment

Workkows consist of computer-supported, data-intensive activities which involve multiple \steps" of processing; Workkow management is an emerging and challenging eld, ooering opportunities for exporting database technology beyond its classical boundaries. In particular, active rules supported by many database systems appear as an ideal paradigm for expressing the control and data ows between processing steps, and consequently they are being proposed as a suitable implementation mechanism for Workkow managers. On the other end, active rules appear a too low level description of Workkows to be presented to Workkow system users. In this paper, we propose automatic derivation techniques of active rules from conceptual Workkow speciications. In addition, the paper includes a full collection of case-independent rules at the basis of any Workkow enactment. The objective and challenge of this research is to give a precise operational semantics to Workkow enactment through active rules, thereby addressing an issue which is still lacking concrete and precise proposals.