An Extensible Workflow Architecture through Web Services

The growing availability of Web services provides a new opportunity for enabling new ways of system integration and interoperability, which are needed to meet the needs of global e-business. In this study, we propose an extensible workflow architecture based on Web services and object-oriented techniques. The proposed architecture contains three components, the Open Kernel Framework, the Universal Resource Manager, and the Process Definition Publisher. We show how this architecture can help extend workflow systems with new features dynamically such as new workflow patterns, new process semantics, new workflow resources, and even new process languages.