Integrating services: Control vs. flow

Specification of business processes is becoming a significant aspect of development of Web-based services. Workflows are applied to a business process in order to identify and describe details in the relationships among different business activities. In structuring the relationships among processes, workflows focus mainly on control flow aspects. In this paper we advocate an alternative method for specifying business processes at the conceptual level. The method is based on the principle of separating different types of flows that trigger each other. We first scrutinize current modeling used in workflows, and then introduce our flow-based conceptual description through case studies.