BPEL4People

The WS -BPEL Extension for People ( WS- BPEL4People ) is an extension to WS -BPEL ( language for describing business processes) and thus also classified in the context of WS -*. Since June 2007, is the specification that was originally presented as a White Paper by IBM and SAP, for standardization at OASIS. WS- BPEL4People uses the specification WS- Human Task, which is further developed by the same OASIS committee. The specification was developed by Adobe, IBM, BEA, Oracle, SAP and Active Endpoints. While WS -BPEL describes only the orchestration of web services, enables WS- BPEL4People, thereby to also include a role-based human interaction.

Features of WS- BPEL4People

• The new element people activity
• To describe a composition model for human tasks and manage
• To describe ways the context state and lifecycle of a people activity and control
• Generic role descriptions and logical groups as well as specific assignments for people depending on the process
• Support of restrictions temporal nature of activities
• Opportunity for stakeholders to access the context and to obtain therefrom, for example, information on previous processor
• Implementation of certain patterns of interaction such as The four-eyes principle
• Extensibility

Interaction of WS- BPEL4People and WS- Human Task

While WS- BPEL4People cares about the concrete integration of human interaction in business processes, provides WS- Human Task longer an abstract description of human interaction such as access to it is available.