Section: Other Grants and Activities

ANR Docflow

Participants : Albert Benveniste, Eric Fabre, Loïc Hélouët, Blaise Genest, Debmalya Biswas, Benoît Masson.

Contract INRIA ANR-06-MDCA-005 January 2007 - April 2010

Docflow (http://www.labri.fr/perso/anca/docflow/main.html ) is a national research project where Distribcom cooperates with INRIA's GEMO team, and the LABRI/Bordeaux. It started in January 2007 and is scheduled to end in April 2010. It is a follow-up of the ARC Asax (see below). The aim of the docflow project is to model, analyze and monitor real life composite services, as tour operators (Opodo) or supply chains (DELL). It builds on the understanding between the Database community (data centric views) and the Discrete Event community (control centric), brought by the past ASAX meetings. The main tool is Active XML, see URL http://activexml.net on Active XML and Web services. So far, only a fragment of AXML was considered. It is called “positive AXML”, and have simplistic control (no move or deletion of data, only copy of nodes are possible at some given nodes, and every copy is possible in parallel). We try to develop a model where control can simulate worflow, and structured data (XML) can be used in the same formalism. This starting point will allow us to develop algorithms to analyse, monitor and optimize worflows with rich data.