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Workflow & Services
Overview of the trends and evolution in Workflow & Services
Workflows are automated representations of business processes that enhance business flexibility and maintainability through separation of the business policy from the applications. In the ambient intelligence environment, workflow management applications will extend content integration and will need to combine functionality from many different applications, rendering security issues at the workflow level prominent. Modelling tools and languages such as the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), WPDL/XPDL, BPEL, BPEL4WS or UML don't provide support for identifying and recording security requirements in an explicit way.
In the deliverable document "State of the art in Workflow & Services", four fields of studies have been identified: workflow modelling, formal requirements specification, security requirements engineering and workflow security tools.
Activities within an organisation, as well as inter-organisational activities are most commonly modelled as workflows. Workflows describe organisational activities in a rather high level of abstraction, which may be an enabler to describe constraints related to security and dependability aspects. Whether we describe security and dependability requirements or any other functional or non-functional requirements, the workflow modelling language is considered as the most critical component.
Emerging industry standards in workflow modelling, such as the BPEL language, are strongly supported by the main software vendors and are focusing on the integration of web services with business processes or workflows. Thus, two trends that should be taken into account, as they have significant implications for security, are the integration of workflows with web services and the emergence of BPEL as the new workflow modelling industry standard.
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