FU Berlin

AG Netzbasierte Informationssysteme / Networkbased Informationsystems
Institut für Informatik, Fachbereich Mathematik und Informatik, Freie Universität Berlin







Workspaces: Coordinating Workflows over the Web






Workspaces is a Web-based workflow management system that combines concepts taken from workflow management, the Internet standards XML and XSL, and coordination technology. Steps are the basic kinds of activity in Workspaces. Each step is represented as an XML document that can be distributed individually for interpretation by the XSL-based Workspaces engine. As a result, distributed workflows can be coordinated via the Web.
A complete workflow is described as a graph in an XML-document. It is split into a set of individual steps during an XSL-based compilation. All steps are stored in a distributed repository that can be accessed by coordination operations in the style of
the Linda-family of coordination languages. The resulting system is based entirely on standard Internet protocols allowing it to be distributed and accessible by standard components.

Publications on Workspaces:
  • Robert Tolksdorf. Workspaces: A Web-Based Workflow Management System. IEEE Internet Computing, 6(5):18–26, 2002.
  • Robert Tolksdorf and Marc Stauch. Using XSL to Coordinate Workflows, In Proceedings of Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen (KiVS), pages 127–138. Springer Verlag, 2001.
  • Marc Stauch and Robert Tolksdorf. Design and Implementation of an XSL-T and XML-based Workflow System, In Proceedings of XML Europe 2001. Graphic Communications Association, Alexandria, VA, 2001.
  • Robert Tolksdorf. Coordination Technology for Workflows on the Web: Workspaces, In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages COORDINATION 2000, LNCS, pages 36–50. Springer-Verlag, 2000.
  • Robert Tolksdorf. Coordinating Work on the Web with Workspaces, In Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises WET ICE 2000. IEEE Computer Society, Press, 2000.
Diplomathesis on Workspaces: