A distributed environment for enabling lightweight flexible workflows

As evident in the healthcare domain, and other enterprise wide applications, it is essential to have all the tasks collaborate in a loosely coupled fashion so that all the independently built applications and tasks can work together in a streamlined manner. A set of distributed, domain independent architectural components is introduced for workflow applications. These components are responsible for isolating applications from the task of communicating with the workflow manager and support greater flexibility and scalability by defining domain independent components and domain specific components separately. With the proposed components, distributed applications can be used in a workflow without a priori knowledge of each other. Consequently, introducing a new application to a set of collaborative applications would be easier than in today´s existing collaboration environments