[4-30]Artifacts+Semantics=Goal-based Workflow...
Date:2008-04-29
Title: Artifacts + Semantics = Goal-based Workflow Construction
Speaker: Prof. Richard Hull
Ball Labs Research, Alcatel-Lucen
Time: 4pm, Wednesday April 30
Venue: Lecture room, Lab for Computer Science, Level 3 Building #5, ISCAS
Abstract
This talk presents a framework and preliminary results that hold the promise of enabling a new style of workflow design, one that is based on specifying declarative "goals" for the desired workflow, rather than specifying the procedural steps that the workflow should follow. Shifting workflow design and specification from a procedural to a declarative basis will enable faster initial design of workflows, faster evolution of workflows as the business environment changes, faster re-use of workflow components, and faster verification of workflow properties.
The new framework builds on the artifact-based approach to workflow pioneered at IBM Research, and is related to other “document-based” approaches to workflow. These approaches are heavily data-centric, focusing first on the life-cycle of key data elements in a workflow (e.g., invoice, purchase order, insurance claim), and secondarily on how workflow tasks can be sequenced to impact those data elements. The fundamental advance of the new framework is to incorporate semantic information into the model. We follow the general spirit of semantic web services, and incorporate explicit pre-conditions and conditional effects into the specifications of the tasks that may operate on artifacts. Our preliminary results focus on a restricted version of this "semantic artifact-based workflow" framework, and develop techniques for automatic construction of workflows that satisfy declaratively specified goals.
Bio
Richard Hull is Director of Computing and Software Principles Research at Bell Labs Research, a division of Alcatel-Lucent. Hull has broad research interests in the areas of data and information management, and web and converged services. Hull is co-author of the book "Foundations of Databases" (Addison-Wesley); has published over 100 articles in journals, conferences and books; and holds six U.S. patents. Before joining Bell Labs he served on the faculty of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, and was a frequent visitor at INRIA in France. His research has been supported in part by grants from NSF, DARPA, and AT&T. Hull was named Bell Labs Fellow in 2005 and ACM Fellow in 2007.
Hull’s current research is focused on web services, workflow, pervasive computing, and personalization. In recent years he has also been instrumental in developing and transferring new technologies into Alcatel-Lucent’s product line, including the Vortex policy engine and the Datagrid data integration tool. In the web services area he was been active with the Semantic Web Services Framework (SWSF) consortium, and has developed foundational results on automated composition of semantic web services and business processes.