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A WorkFlow Management System (WFMS) is a software system to support an automatic, efficient execution of business processes. A business process often involves document processing. Although, many traditional WFMSs can support the document processing to some extent, they are concerned mainly with document delivery. We propose an XML-based approach to WFMS for form document processing on the Web. Taking advantage of XML, we can partition a document into several meaningful segments, each of which in this approach becomes a unit of work that can be performed by some activities in a workflow process. Based on this document partition, we develop a formal model, called document-process association model, which can associate the units of work with process activities. The model not only provides a tight control over document-related processes, but it also enables various useful services, such as customization of document monitoring and contents-based interaction between WFMS and other application programs. A prototype system has been implemented to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model.

Today’s business environment makes it indispensable for a company to deal with complex business processes. A workflow management system is a software system to support an automatic, efficient execution of the business processes [14] and [18]. Such a business process often involves document processing. In this paper, we consider a WorkFlow Management System (WFMS) that can manage the document flow over a workflow process. An essential ability in such a WFMS is to keep track of the documents’ trace and to control their dependency with the underlying workflow process. Many traditional WFMSs can support document processing to some extent [27]. However, the WFMSs are concerned mainly with document delivery. While controlling a business process, a WFMS identifies a document that the process should deal with, and simply conveys the document to a relevant user. Consider typical documents, such as purchase order, engineering change order, and cost estimation sheet, and so on. Most such documents in a business process have a certain format, that is, it is composed of a number of fields with some kind of structures. We call such a document a form document. In a typical business process, an activity is often associated with filling in a form document. It may involve inserting new values into some fields of the document or modifying those values. This indicates that document processing may not be considered separately from the process flow. Such a notion leads us to consider the necessity of associating form document elements with process activities, so that WFMS can provide a more tight control over document-related processes. Although, existing form-based WFMS’s support such activities, they are significantly limited as follows. First, the existing approaches consider a whole document as a unit work. This means that it is hard for an activity to deal with a part of one document. Second, most commercial form-based WFMS’s use their own proprietary format. This requires that to understand the document contents a client application should know the format. Using XML [34] as a form document format, we have been able to develop an effective method that can resolve the above problems. We propose, an XML-based approach to WFMS for form document processing on the Web. Taking advantage of XML, we can partition a document into several meaningful segments. A segment is a unit of work that can be performed by some activities in a workflow process. We develop a formal model that associates those units of work with process activities. The proposed model not only supports the execution of document processing with respect to the document flow, but it also enables various useful services during the document processing. A prototype system has been implemented to demonstrate some important document-related functions.

The main purpose of our research is to develop an effective method of handling form documents considering the semantics of workflow processes. Since traditional WFMSs supporting a simple delivery of form documents cannot handle a part of the document elements, it is difficult to make any meaningful action based on the contents. To solve this problem, an XML-based document-process association model is proposed. Our approach supports the semantic relationships between a form document and a workflow process. The use of XML can partition a form document into several meaningful parts. This document modularization provides a basis for sophisticated control of document contents during a process execution. We have developed a formalized model to associate objects in form documents with a process model. This model can support various document-related functions in WFMS. A set of document objects or their properties can be easily obtained through database queries, so that our approach facilitates document-related activities. It also makes it easy to customize the monitoring environment for individual users. Another advantage is that a workflow engine can interact with an invoked application based on document contents. A prototype system has been implemented to demonstrate these advantages. An interesting further research issue is to augment WFMS functions with synchronous collaboration. WFMS is a typical example of asynchronous collaboration system, like groupware and electronic document management systems. For the synchronous collaboration, however, it requires a fine control mechanism to avoid inconsistency among document contents, maintain dynamic changes in the documents, and handle exceptions [12] and [17]. Advanced transaction models [3] and technologies in computer supported cooperative work [28] may be able to provide a potential solution to these issues.