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Comparing workflow specification languages: A matter of views

Published: 04 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We address the problem of comparing the expressiveness of workflow specification formalisms using a notion of view of a workflow. Views allow to compare widely different workflow systems by mapping them to a common representation capturing the observables relevant to the comparison. Using this framework, we compare the expressiveness of several workflow specification mechanisms, including automata, temporal constraints, and pre-and postconditions, with XML and relational databases as underlying data models. One surprising result shows the considerable power of static constraints to simulate apparently much richer workflow control mechanisms.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Database Systems
ACM Transactions on Database Systems  Volume 37, Issue 2
May 2012
326 pages
ISSN:0362-5915
EISSN:1557-4644
DOI:10.1145/2188349
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 June 2012
Accepted: 01 January 2012
Revised: 01 January 2012
Received: 01 May 2011
Published in TODS Volume 37, Issue 2

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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)Projection Views of Register AutomataProceedings of the 39th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems10.1145/3375395.3387651(299-313)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2020
  • (2018)An Analysis of Workflow Formalisms for Workflows with Complex Non-Functional RequirementsCompanion of the 2018 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering10.1145/3185768.3186297(107-112)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2018
  • (2018)Highly Expressive Query Languages for Unordered Data TreesTheory of Computing Systems10.1007/s00224-015-9617-557:4(927-966)Online publication date: 26-Dec-2018
  • (2017)Research Directions for Principles of Data Management (Abridged)ACM SIGMOD Record10.1145/3092931.309293345:4(5-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2017
  • (2013)Foundations of data-aware process analysisProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/2463664.2467796(1-12)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2013
  • (2013)Collaborative data-driven workflowsProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI symposium on Principles of database systems10.1145/2463664.2463672(91-102)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2013

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