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Workflow
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workflow
Workflow at its simplest is the movement of documents and/or tasks
through a work process. More specifically, workflow is the operational aspect of
a work procedure: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their
relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support
the tasks and how tasks are being tracked. As the dimension of time is
considered in Workflow, Workflow considers "throughput" as a distinct measure.
Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using graph-based formalisms like
Petri nets.
While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology,
support for workflow is an integral part of document management and imaging
software.
Distinction can be made between "scientific" and "business" workflow
paradigms. While the former is mostly concerned with throughput of data through
various algorithms, applications and services, the latter concentrates on
scheduling task executions, including dependencies which are not necessarily
data-driven and may include human agents.
Scientific workflows found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics
and cheminformatics in the early 2000s, where they successfully met the need for
multiple interconnected tools, handling of multiple data formats and large data
quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows was close to the
well-established tradition of Perl scripting in life-science research
organizations, so this adoption represented a natural step forward towards a
more structured infrastructure setup.
Business workflows are more generic, being able to represent any structuring
of tasks, and are equally applicable to task scheduling within a software
application server and organizing a paper or electronic document trail within an
organization. Their origins date back to the 1970s, when they were purely
paper-based, and the principles from that period made the transition to modern
IT infrastructure systems.
As a way of bridging the gap between the two, significant effort is being put
into defining workflow patterns that can be used to compare and contrast
different workflow engines across both of these domains.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses
material from the Wikipedia article "Workflow". |