Wowww!: managing workflow on the World Wide Web

As the Internet/intranet/WWW technologies become more and more mature and Web-based applications become richer and richer, we are provided with an ideal computing environment to construct workflow management systems (WfMSs). Web-based WfMSs can help business goals to be achieved effectively by means of integrating various distributed resources and applications and coordinating work activities in an easy to access environment. This paper describes a Web-based general purpose workflow management system named Wowww!, detailing its architecture, the workflow engine, the workflow model and the algorithms used for workflow instance execution. Other features and some considerations for future work are also discussed