Organizational modeling in UML and XML in the context of workflow systems

ABSTRACT

Workflow technology plays a key role as an enabler in E-Commerce applications, such as supply chains. Until recently the major share of the attention of workflow systems researchers has gone to the exchange of information in cross-organizational processes. Increasingly the focus is shifting from the exchange of data to support for interorganizational workflow processes. One of the initiatives in this direction has been XRL (eXchangeable Routing Language), an extendible instance-based language having an XML syntax and Petri-net semantics. In this paper, we move to the next level by extending XRL with organizational entities, structures, and rules. Hence, we describe an organizational model first in UML and then convert it into an XML DTD. Our organizational model allows for the specification of non-human resources, collections of resources (e.g., departments, teams, etc.), availability of resources, delegation, and role inheritance. Additional features of our proposal are the tight integration of organizational concepts and routing concepts. An important goal of this work is to create standard for organizational modeling much like the X. 500 standard for directories.

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