ODBASE'08 Keynote speaker

Artifacts in Business Processes: Helping Workflows Become Declarative

Abstract

Traditional workflow is process-centric, which brings challenges in the areas of easy evolvability, component re-use, distributions of workflows across multiple organizations, the use of broadly-based key performance indicators (KPIs), and provenance. IBM Research has been working on a new approach to workflow design and implementation, which is fundamentally data-centric. In this approach, business operations are first modeled in terms of the business artifacts (or entities, or documents) that flow through the system, along with a high-level view of their life-cycle. Services (or tasks) are used to specify the automated and/or human steps that help move artifacts through their life-cycle, and the services are associated to the artifacts using procedural, graph-based, and/or declarative formalisms. This talk introduces the data-centric approach to workflow, describes a framework and tools currently in use to design and implement data-centric workflows, and overviews a variety of research challenges and opportunities stemming from the data-centric approach, ranging from the theoretical to the practical.

Speaker Bio

Richard Hull recently joined IBM Research, Watson, as a Research Staff Member and Manager. Hull has broad research interests in the areas of data and information management, workflow and business processes, 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. Prior to joining IBM Research, Hull was Director of Computing and Software Principles Research at Bell Labs Research, a division of Alcatel-Lucent. While there, in addition to pursuing research on semantic web services, converged services, personalization, and data management, Hull was instrumental in developing and transferring new technologies into Alcatel-Lucent's product line, including the Vortex policy engine and the Datagrid data integration tool. Before joining Bell Labs in 1996 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.