Specification of Interorganizational Workflows - A Comparison of Approaches

With the rise of the Web as the major platform for making data and services available for both, humans and applications, interorganizational workflows became a crucial issue. Several languages for the specification of interorganizational workflows have been already proposed, each of them having different origins and pursuing different goals for dealing with the unique characteristics of interorganizational workflows. This paper compares these proposals, trying to identify their strengths and shortcomings. As a pre-requisite, a framework of requirements is suggested which categorizes the major characteristics of specification languages for interorganizational workflows into different perspectives. For each of these perspectives, a set of functional requirements is proposed thereby emphasizing the difference to traditional intraorganizational workflows. On the basis of this framework, seven representative specification languages are surveyed and compared to each other.