WfMC_20080422_Meeting

 

Notes (Note)

 

Public Description - WfMC_20080422_Meeting

WfMC Technical Committee Meeting, Apr 22-23, 2008

Monday, 4/21/08

  • WfMC Tutorial, 8:00am-4:30pm

Tuesday, 4/22/08

  • TC Meeting 10:45am-6:00pm*
  • ERC Meeting 10:00am-12:00pm*
  • WfMC 15th Anniversary Dinner 7:00pm

Wednesday, 4/23/08

  • TC Meeting 10:45am-12:00pm*
  • ERC Meeting 10:00am-12:00pm*
  • SC Meeting 12:30pm-3:30pm* (will break and continue if necessary after 4:30pm)

Thursday, 4/24/08

  • WfMC Asia Region Meeting, 8:30am-12:00pm, Hotel Palomar, 2121 P Street NW, Washington

*Working Group meetings will need to be worked around Jon, Michael, Robert, Shane and Keith's presentations

Agenda

Technical Committee, Chair: Keith Swenson

WG1-XPDL (Process Definition Interchange)

  • Status Update Briefing (Robert Shapiro)
  • Demonstration and discussion of BPMN portability conformance for SIMPLE and STANDARD classes
  • General Discussion of XPDL conformance. Establish procedures, Review Group etc.
    • See attached files on Compliance. Compliance Testing.docx and Compliance testing addendum.rtf for discussion at the meeting.

WG4 - Wf-XML (Run-time Interoperability)

  • Coordination with Open Geospatial Consortium situation
  • Wf-XML-R Status (Keith Swenson) (please review attached PDF file: WfXML-R.pdf for discussion at the meeting.)
  • Name discussion.

WG5 meeting (BPAF)

  • Business Process Analytics Format Status (Michael zur Muehlen, Shane Gabie)
  • Status of BPRI
  • Future work & AOB

Work and Activities: Status / Overview / Update

  • Discussion for new Interface 2 working group.
  • Tutorial Presentation Materials Status.
  • Industry Architecture & Standards Stack
  • Glossary update
  • Other standardization initiatives including
    • ISO status,
    • OMG BPDM status.
  • Reference Model update
  • Wikipedia: has a page on Process Architecture that does not mention our Reference Architecture, and probably should since the page is criticized as being from a single source.

Any other business

  • ??

Steering Committee Agenda

I. Steering Committee, Chair: Jon Pyke

  • Approval of Minutes of Previous Meeting
  • Agenda Discussion
  • Introductions
  • Approval of New Specifications
  • Officer and Committee Openings
  • Update/Action Items on WfMC Talking Points

II. ER Committee, Chair: Ken Mei

  • 2008/2009 Meeting Schedule
  • XPDL Adoption and Publicity Campaign
  • 2007/2008 Awards Programs

III. Executive Director

  • Summary of Activities
  • New Members and Membership Activity
  • New Programs
  • Change in Country Chapter Charter

IV. Treasurer?s Report

V. Additional Business


Speaking Conflicts

  • Keith: Wednesday 9:40-10:25
  • Michael: Tue 10:30-11:15
  • Michael: Wed 10:35-12:00
  • Robert: Tuesday 9:30-10:15
  • Shane: Tuesday 11:30-12:00
  • Pat Cappelaere: Wed 2:30-3:15

Technical Committee Minutes

Anti-trust ? statement brought to attendees attention.

Minutes from Previous Meeting Nashville

Robert Shapiro moved to approve minutes and Shane Gabie seconded. Minuets unanimously accepted/approved

Attendees

  • Shane Gabie
  • Tom Laverty
  • Pat Cappelaere
  • Robert Shapiro
  • Justin Brunt
  • Keith Swenson
  • Cor Visser (pm)
  • Yoshihisa Sadakane(pm)
  • Kwang-Hoon Kim (pm)
  • Michael zur Muehlen (pm)

Agenda Review

  • Speaker conflicts dictate order of agenda
  • XPDL - XPDL 2.1 voting in SC on Wednesday on ratification of completed specification. No objections received to date. Based on success of XPDL expectations now higher so need to spend time on conformance compliance topic
  • BPAF - Intention to get first draft out for review. Need to discuss today.
  • Wf-XML

Working Group 1

XPDL conformance/compliance

TC XPDL 2.1 approved at Nashville meeting Made available to members for vote. SC vote to release as official spec on Wednesday Continued to work on portability. Tom Laverty worked on XSLT to test conformance. Working with Bruce Silver. Initially working on 2 initial classes. Bruce came up with BPMN diagrams to demonstrate compliance. XSL lists violations and structural problems. Many tools will malfunction if read structurally problematic XPDL docs even if pass schema.

Get all vendors to buy into SIMPLE compliance test. Need to discuss whether vendors validate own models. Spec includes SIMPLE model but now also have STANDARD model (but not in spec.).

Test can run SIMPLE test against any model not just against the SIMPLE Model. Structural integrity can be applied to any model. Need document that provides.

Robert has demo that walks through the process of validation. Conformance page on Wiki which includes conformance forum. Not much traffic at the moment.

Should put conformance materials on to the Wiki and make sure point people to this. XSL, usage documentation, diagrams and XPDL representation etc. should be posted. Document includes SIMPLE and STANDARD. Need document on STANDARD and how to prove conformance.

SIMPLE XPDL generated by ITP Commerce and STANDARD was generated by Global 360 and is an example generated by ITP Commerce. Some questions have arisen as part of this work. For example - Some tools support embedded sub-procs displayed in context of process that they are embedded within. Nothing to do with conformance per se. Can all tools do the right thing when collapsing and expanding the sub-procs. Could continue this discussion on the forum but not sure how much success there would be in doing this. Robert put out straw man proposal for model for conformance compliance. 3 main categories ? Import ? Export ? Import/Export Hardest part ? elements and attributes in a portability conformance class above that which the tool claims to support. Need to work on this issue. Need to enlist other s in this exercise so that it doesn?t end up as a single vendor driven initiative.

Graphical conformance ? layout and resizing etc.

Grades of conformance not just a simple yes/no. need to be able to view the imported diagram and it to have an acceptable understanding (visually). Assess on import to determine scaling relative to normal to that tool and display accordingly. On export what should be done? If don?t scale may end up with overlapping nodes.

ACTION Robert Shapiro- Need to make recommendation on how to scale on Import. Robert will rework his section on graphical layout and we can the review.

Test process for import what XPDL should look like on screen when imported Test diagram for creation and export

Keith/Nathaniel suggest Checklist/matrix for self compliance? Spot checks to verify that vendors are correctly declaring their tools compliance.

Pat ? who should have access to these tools? WfMC members only?

A suggestion might be - Free for self checks and declaration. Charge for WfMC endorsed conformance. What level of charge should it be? Who would provide the service (remember Doculabs proposal) Defer to SC. Web based tool/wizard. Need to be able to see what generated XPDL looks like in another vendor neutral tool. Description of quality of XPDL

At OGC for every new specification a conformance suite must be provided.

Start with SIMPLE model.

Include reference to/acknowledgement of BPM Japan compliance effort. Pat suggested Vendor ?bake-off? but within closed doors. Each vendor could then decide what to do about own results. Perform in conjunction with OGC. RFP in conjunction with OGC ? interoperability of XPDL 2.1 and see who responds. Sponsorship from large organizations (government agencies etc.)to sponsor and then be able to reimburse participants. In 6 months+ time? Need to devise scenarios that are realizable.

Would need practice event at fall meeting.

Cor suggested sending out RFI to certification organizations to see what responses have.

Way of tackling organization issues might be under the auspices of an XPDL users group. If an external organization performs testing they would have a learning curve and a burden on WfMC committee members. Could one of the vendor?s tools be used as the basis for a web based test tool? Global 360, Fujitsu, TIBCO? Similar to Keith?s XML Formatter ? paste XPDL in and then get graphic of process in return providing it passes the schema and structural test etc.

Robert proposed a motion to perform an XPDL interoperability bake off in conjunction with OGC and seconded by Keith. To be proposed to SC.

Robert demonstrated conformance test using ITP Commerce to produce the process and associated XPDL.

BPAF

Michael presented current state of draft specification. Process state Model. Don't have equivalent to for activity model so idea was to look at WS-HumanTask/BPEL4People activity state model. How would we name the events that are being recorded. Names differ between BPAF and WS-HumanTask/BPEL4People.

For every event show state that transitioning into and ideally the one that was being exited from. Discussion of states required and correspondence between BPAF and WS-HumanTask/BPEL4People? ACTION ? Michael to update BPAF document following discussion on states required.

Interfaces 2 and 4

Keith would like to restart interface 2 initiative with a Web services emphasis.

Need new acronym for interface 2 as it gains more interest than ?Interface 5?.

Two separate work groups for worklist related topics and interoperability

W-XML-R

Keith presented an overview of Wf-XML-R document.

Standards Book

Put together based on transcript from Nashville tutorial. The book is printed on demand and costs $15 and WfMC makes $6 per book. It is proposed that it could be tailored for vendors based on sponsorship.