Facilitating Workflow Interoperation Using Artifact-Centric Hubs

Enabling interoperation between workflows, and between web services, continues to be a fundamental challenge. This paper proposes a new approach to interoperation based on hubs that are designed using “business artifacts”, a data-centric paradigm for workflow and business process specification. The artifact-centric interoperation hubs are focused primarily on facilitating communication and business-level synchronization between relatively autonomous stakeholders (and stakeholder organizations). Interoperation hubs provide a centralized, computerized rendezvous point, where stakeholders can read or write data of common interest and check the current status of an aggregate process, and from which they can receive notifications about events of interest. The paper describes the approach, including an extended example, access restrictions that can be placed on stakeholders, some preliminary theoretical results, and a discussion of work towards a prototype system that supports interoperation hubs.