Web services and business process management
Author: IBM Systems Journal
Web services are unanimously supported by major suppliers of middleware technology (see for example References 1-5). Standards in this area, such as SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), (6) WSDL (Web Services Description Language), (7) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), (8) are being proposed or agreed on, and serve as a basis for implementing product features. Many vendors provide early implementations of technologies and proposed or drafted standards (see for example References 9, 10). The World Wide Web Consortium runs a working group defining a set of standards in this area. Known as the "XML (Extensible Markup Language) Protocol," (11) it is based on input collected from vendors and early adopters of this technology. (12) One of the components of the XML Protocol will have to describe how Web services are integrated into business processes; proposals for such a standard can be found in References 13 and 14.
In this paper we focus on the relation between Web services and business processes, as well as elements needed for a suitable standard. In the next section we summarize the basics of the service-oriented architecture and sketch SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI as the relevant proposed standards. In the following section we describe a high-level scenario that links business processes and Web services. We review some background from the area of workflow technology (15) in the section "Flows between Web services" and demonstrate the applicability of this technology to the problem area. Next, in "Process topologies" we show how enterprises can do business with each other and provide joint services to their customers based on the previously introduced technology. Next we discuss the opportunities for re-engineering business processes. Then, in "Business process management" we put it all together and describe how business processes can be managed in a Web services environment. We briefly sketch IBM product support for business processes and Web services, and in the last section we summarize the contents of the paper and point to some open research questions.
Service-oriented architecture and relevant standards
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