Internet Based Workflow Management: Towards a Semantic Web

Today, an ever-expanding set of human activities, ranging from business processes to healthcare to education and research, is dependent upon the Internet. Most processes involve a workflow, the coordinated execution of multiple activities. In a given application, once the key stages of the workflow have been isolated, an infrastructure to coordinate the handling of individual cases is necessary.

Internet-Based Workflow Management shows how to understand, develop, and use societal services for process coordination in an information grid with a rich set of hardware and software resources. In such a semantic web, individual services offered by autonomous service providers can be composed to perform the complex tasks involved in emerging new applications.

The book is designed to be accessible to IT practitioners and researchers as well as to those without formal training in computer science. Businesspeople, scientists, engineers, or anyone else involved in the development of Internet-centric applications will find the book an invaluable resource. The coverage includes:

• Workflow management
• Distributed systems
• Modeling of distributed systems and workflows
• Networking
• Quality of service
• Open systems
• Software agents
• Knowledge management
• Planning

In the final chapter of the book, Dan Marinescu brings together all these elements in a case study that shows the step-by-step development of middleware for process coordination. This middleware is available under an open source license at www.wiley.com.

Table of Contents

Preface.

Acronyms.

Internet-Based Workflows.

Basic Concepts and Models.

Net Models of Distributed Systems and Workflows.

Internet Quality of Service.

From Ubiquitous Internet Services to Open Systems.

Coordination and Software Agents.

Knowledge Representation, Inference, and Planning.

Middleware for Process Coordination: A Case Study.

Glossary.

Index.