WS-BPEL Extension for People

Level: Advanced

Contributors: Active Endpoints, Adobe, BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP AG

25 Aug 2005
Updated 25 Jun 2007

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Human user interactions are currently not covered by the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), which is primarily designed to support automated business processes based on Web services. However the spectrum of activities that make up general purpose business processes is broader than this, because people often participate in the execution of business processes. To support a broad range of scenarios involving people within business processes, a BPEL extension is required.

The "BPEL4People" white paper describes scenarios where users are involved in business processes, and motivates and outlines appropriate extensions to WS-BPEL to address these scenarios. The WS-BPEL Extension for People and WS-HumanTask specifications take the ideas outlined in the white paper and together provide a concrete realization of them.

BPEL4People is layered on top of the BPEL language so that its features can be composed with the BPEL core features whenever needed. We envisage that additional BPEL extensions might be introduced in the future.

The authors plan to submit the specifications to a recognized standards development organization in the near future.

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Resources

• Read Business Process Execution Language for Web Services for background on BPEL.
  
  
• The Web Service Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0 is available from OASIS.
  
  
• WS-BPEL 2.0: Extensions for Sub-Processes provides a means for the invocation of a business process as a sub-process of another business process, such that its lifecycle is coupled to the lifecycle of the parent process.
  
  
• Read BPELJ: BPEL for Java technology, a white paper that explains how the two languages can be used together to build business process applications (developerWorks, March 2004).
  

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