The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) is a non-profit making organization whose members are workflow vendors, users, analysts and university/research groups. They describe their mission as ‘to promote and develop the use of workflow through the establishment of standards for software terminology, inter-operability and connectivity between workflow products’. See
www.wfmc.org for more information about the WfMC.
The WfMC has developed the Workflow Standard XML Process Definition Language (XPDL). The WfMC explain that “XPDL provides a framework for implementing business process management and workflow engines, and for designing, analyzing, and exchanging business processes”. See
www.wfmc.org for more information about the XPDL standard. Information about XPDL in this guide has been referenced from
www.wfmc.org/standards/docs/TC-1025_10_xpdl_10250.pdf.
The benefit of XPDL is that it enables inter-operability between workflow systems. This is achieved by describing business processes in the smallest amount of entities possible, so that it enables process definitions from other vendors to be easily transformed into XPDL. This means that, as long as the vendor supports XPDL, process definitions can be used by different vendors, regardless of the workflow system that was used to produce them originally. For example, you can take a process definition that has been created by third party vendor, Enhydra™ JaWE (Java Workflow Editor) and load it into iProcess and vice versa.
