DecSerFlow: Towards a Truly Declarative Service Flow Language

Abstract

The need for process support in the context of web services
has triggered the development of many languages, systems, and standards. 
Industry has been developing software solutions and proposing
standards such as BPEL, while researchers have been advocating the
use of formal methods such as Petri nets and pi-calculus. The languages
developed for service flows, i.e., process specification languages for web
services, have adopted many concepts from classical workflow management 
systems. As a result, these languages are rather procedural and
this does not fit well with the autonomous nature of services. Therefore,
we propose DecSerFlow as a Declarative Service Flow Language. DecSerFlow 
can be used to specify, enact, and monitor service flows. The
language is extendible (i.e., constructs can be added without changing
the engine or semantical basis) and can be used to enforce or to check the
conformance of service flows. Although the language has an appealing
graphical representation, it is grounded in temporal logic.