Deriving active rules for workflow enactment

Workflows consist of computer-supported, data-intensive activities which involve multiple "steps" of processing; Workflow management is an emerging and challenging field, offering opportunities for exporting database technology beyond its classical boundaries. In particular, active rules supported by many database systems appear as an ideal paradigm for expressing the control and data flows between processing steps, and consequently they are being proposed as a suitable implementation mechanism for Workflow managers. On the other end, active rules appear a too low level description of Workflows to be presented to Workflow system users. In this paper, we propose automatic derivation techniques of active rules from conceptual Workflow specifications. In addition, the paper includes a full collection of case-independent rules at the basis of any Workflow enactment. The objective and challenge of this research is to give a precise operational semantics to Workflow enactment through active rules, thereby addressing an issue which is still lacking concrete and precise proposals.