Analyzing workflows implied by instance-dependent access rules

Toon Calders, Stijn Dekeyser, Jan Hidders, Jan Paredaens
2006 Proceedings of the twenty-fifth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems - PODS '06  
Recently proposed form-based web information systems liberate the capture and reuse of data in organizations by substituting the development of technical implementations of electronic forms for the conceptual modelling of forms' tree-structured schemas and their data access rules. Significantly, these instance-dependent rules also imply a workflow process associated to a form, eliminating the need for a costly workflow design phase. Instead, the workflows thus created in an ad hoc manner by
more » ... phisticated end-users can be automatically analyzed, and incorrect forms rejected. This paper examines fundamental correctness properties of workflows that are implied by instance-dependent access rules. Specifically, we study the decidability of the form completability property and the semi-soundness of a form's workflow. These problems are affected by a choice of constraints on the path language used to express access rules and completion formulas, and on the depth of the form's schema tree. Hence, we study these problems by examining them in the context of several different fragments determined by such constraints. are many different, traditionally database-oriented formal aspects associated to these form-based web information systems (fb-wis), including data and schema integration [3] and workflow analysis [6, 10] . This paper studies the latter: access rules included in a form's definition imply a workflow process that-rather simply put-describes the order in which data can be entered in a form. Hence, in this type of workflow systems, the data-flow implies the control-flow. In contrast to existing workflow systems and research, an fb-wis does not require complex initial design and subsequent modification phases for workflows. This establishes the motivation for our paper: workflow processes implied by forms that were created in an ad hoc manner by unsophisticated users need to be analyzed automatically such that forms with an incorrect workflow will be rejected by the fb-wis and users can be told how they should modify their form's definition.
doi:10.1145/1142351.1142365 dblp:conf/pods/CaldersDHP06 fatcat:m2cgdnwjpnftrk2uifyrobts5q