Design and implementation of the engine component within a web based document workflow system

In the past few years, document workflow management systems have been revised to take advantage of the possibilities introduced by new web technologies in terms of content management and workflow enactment. Moreover, in order to fully exploit the possibilities introduced by collaborative work and structured documents, the need for re-engineering the old workflow processes, traditionally based on atomic documents, has become evident and sometimes unanswered. The solution proposed in this work, has taken in consideration the needs for ease of deployment and workflow flexibility of small organizations, such as public administration offices, which workflows are predominantly document driven. From the study of the theoretical aspects of document workflows, its constitutive elements and the current available solutions, this work has evolved with the devising of a new document centric workflow description language capable of describing the most common document-driven workflow patterns. The workflow description language has been thought to enable more sophisticated users to write the workflow description “by-hand” in order to fully exploit the potential of the solution proposed. To support the run-time execution of the described workflow, a language interpreter and a workflow engine have been developed. These two components are responsible for the management of the workflow instances, the interaction with workflow participants and the enforcement of correct routing of the documents