Federated Process Framework for Transparent Process Monitoring in Business Process Outsourcing - Advanced Topics in Database Research - page 283

process status, though an activity is a logical and independent unit of work within a business
process. Thus, the proposed XML document structure extends the Wf-XML by taking an
activity as a unit of process information sharing. More specifi cally, an ActivitySet element and

a ProcessDataSet element are defi ned inside the ProcessDataSet WfMessageBody element. The ActivitySet

element is to contain all the ongoing activities currently involved ( Activity element), and element is to contain all the ongoing activities currently involved ( element is to contain all the ongoing activities currently involved ( Activity

every Activity element has its identity ( AID element has its identity ( element) and state ( State element). Similarly,

the ProcessDataSet element is to contain all the process data used by the ongoing activi-

element has its identity ( AID

ProcessDataSet element is to contain all the process data used by the ongoing activi-

ties ( ProcessData element has its identity ( element)

and value ( Value element). In this way, the tree-structured XML DTD represents activities'
states and associated process data systematically. Moreover, it serves as a generic message
specifi cation to facilitate data transfer between different business processes.
In brief, the fi rst step introduces systematic representations of a process model and
process status by providing an object data model and XML document structure. Using these
representations, the following steps will describe how local process models can be restricted
and integrated according to local sharing policies.

element), and every ProcessData element has its identity ( Key element has its identity ( Key

Second Step: Construction of an External Process Model
The second step is to establish a sharing policy and to extract a partial process model
from a local process model according to the established sharing policy. Since an activity is a
logical unit of process information sharing, the sharing policy is defi ned as a set of activities
shared with other participants. For example, when the transportation company in Figure 2
wants to hide the process information related to A 2,5 and A 2,6 from the online store, the shared
activities are A 2,1 , A 2,2 , A 2,3 , A 2,4 , and A 2,7 . In doing so, the transportation company constructs

Figure 4: Rules for removing a hidden activity