Oliver, Thanks for the input... > van der Aalst? actually I've got his paper open right now, but haven't finished it yet.
> there is *NO* standard BPM language My jury is still out on this (xpdl)... I haven't made my yet through the entire spec yet. > Did you consider this in your search, or do you think that's overdone? consider what ? this excerpt from Baeyens' "state of workflow" paper? <insert resource="http://www.jbpm.org/state.of.workflow.html";> Why the term 'activity' should be banned... Process definitions are usually expressed in terms of activities. I think *that* is the main reason of all the confusion in the workflow space and therefore a bad idea. I'll tell you why: the term activity blurs the distinction between a state and an action. A state (aka wait-state) in a process specifies a dependency upon an external actor. At process execution time, this means that the workflow engine has to wait until the external actor notifies the WFMS that the state is finished. E.g. waiting for an approval. An action is a piece of programming logic to be executed by the WFMS upon a specified event that occurs during process execution. The WFMS initiates the execution of the action on a specified event during process execution. E.g. sending an email when a state is assigned to an actor. As you can see, state and actions are really different so using the same name for these concepts is a bad habit. My proposal is to avoid the term 'activity' and replace it by either 'state' or 'action'. </insert> I'm assuming this is what you mean when you say petri nets are at the core. I understand where he's coming from and states/actions seems a little more intuitive than activities, but I don't see this as a major problem like he does. Again the jury's still out on this in my mind. I have yet to fully evaluate shark, and that's my main reasoning behind investigating xpdl. -Ben --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
