Workflow

Workflow is the operational aspect of a work procedure: how tasks are structured, who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked. As the dimension of time is considered in Workflow, Workflow considers "throughput" as a distinct measure. Workflow problems can be modeled and analyzed using Petri nets.

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While the concept of workflow is not specific to information technology, support for workflow is an integral part of groupware software.

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Distinction can be made between "scientific" and "business" workflow paradigms. While the former is mostly concerned with throughput of data through various algorithms, applications and services, the latter concentrates on scheduling task executions, ensuring dependencies which are not neccessarily data-driven and may include human agents.

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Scientific workflows found wide acceptance in the fields of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in the early 2000-s, where they successfully met the need for multiple interconnected tools, handling of multiple data formats and large data quantities. Also, the paradigm of scientific workflows was close to the well-established tradition of Perl scripting in life-science research organization, so this adoption represented a natural step forward towards a more structured infrastructure setup.

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Business workflows are more generic, being able to represent any structuring of tasks, and are equally applicable to task scheduling within a software application server and organizing a paper document trail within an organization. Their origins date back to the 70-s, when they were purely paper-based, and the principles from that period made the transition to modern IT infrastructure systems.

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As a way of bridging the gap between the two, significant effort is being put into defining workflow patterns that can be used to compare and contrast different workflow engines across both of these domains.

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Work procedure: Work Procedure - a fundamental unit of activity carried out by either human or machine...

Task: "Task" has several meanings:...

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