The Applicability of Workflow Management Systems for the Preservation of Business Processes

Digital preservation research has increasingly been shifting focus from the preservation of data and static objects to investigate the preservation of complete processes and workflows. Capturing all aspects of a process to be preserved, however, is an extensive and difficult undertaking, as it requires capturing complete software setups with potentially complex setups. Further, the process might use external services that are not easy to capture and monitor. In this paper, we therefore investigate the applicability and usability of using Workflow Management Systems for executing processes in a standard environment where the state of the process can be closely monitored. To this end, we compare three popular workflow management systems. We use a scenario from eScience, implementing a data analysis process, to evaluate the challenges and implications for establishing sustainable and verifyable eScience processes.