Introduction

Hi,

I'm Alistair Barros participating in this working group
from the DSTC, a research centre based in
sunny Queensland, Australia - http://www.dstc.edu.au.
DSTC is no stranger to the W3C and OMG space having
participated in a number of technical specifications.
Of interest to this group will be the UML Profile for
EDOC which provides a business process modelling language
component produced with IBM - http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ptc/2002-02-05

I have a 16 year IT background split over commercial
and research activities involving database, workflow
and component (J2EE) based research and applications. Last year I
worked on the design of the Queensland Government's
e-service framework which exposed me to the complexities involved
in service configuration and deployment, composition and independent
brokerage. I'm now looking at the implications for service composition
in non-regulating environments.

In terms of workflow I looked at extensions to (function
decomposition based) workflow languages and collaborated
with a number of researchers who produced the set of workflow
patterns (already being discussed in this group's mail) -
http://tmitwww.tm.tue.nl/research/patterns/
As a separate thread, I also collaborated on OMG's EDOC BPM
spec (mentioned above).

The different developments of workflow and choreography
specifications, in my view, are a *positive* indication of the
demand of process languages, within a demand technology
setting. Workflow of itself, with years of commercial
presence, and zillions of publications, didn't have this
kind of luxury. In this respect I disagree with some of the
caution raised against the emergent "standards" and remain skeptical
about a single silver bullet.

On the other hand developments/lessons of the past need to
guide the rigour and "completeness" of new choreography
languages. The contribution of Wil van de Aalst is an
important pointer to the imperative of expressive power and
well-defined semantics of process languages. We also know
that distinctions should remain between the concrete and abstract
levels of these languages. And finally we know that newer domains
like web services are bound to bring newer requirements not
apparent in the past, and these need to be anticipated with
fresh eyes.

I agree to participate per the charter
http://www.w3.org/2003/01/wscwg-charter last revised 2003/01/14

I do not have personal knowledge of any IPR claims held by DSTC
regarding the subject.

Cheers, Alistair.
_______________________________________________________
Dr Alistair Barros
Senior Research Scientist
Distributed Systems Technology    Phone: +61 7 33654364
  Centre http://www.dstc.edu.au   Fax: +61 7 33654311
General Purpose South Building
University of QLD Brisbane 4072 Australia
_______________________________________________________

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 2003 19:30:25 UTC