Developing an XML repository for workflow management

For workflow systems using XML documents for saving workflow process definitions and especially for XML-based workflow systems, a repository is needed to provide control for XML documents. The repository allows uniform access to shared data and facilitates integration among tools in workflow systems. An XML repository gives the best solution to maintain, exchange, and modify the workflow process definition meta data, which is in the form of XML documents. The XML repository, where users can lookup the workflow definition objects, serves as the metadata foundation of the workflow system. In this paper, we developed an XML repository (called REPOWO: repository for workflow) that can store, delete, search and transform XML documents. REPOWO is implemented by combining EJB components based on RDBMS. With REPOWO, workflow process definitions, data type definitions and transition informations can easily be managed.