Workflow support for electronic commerce applications

Internet-based electronic commerce is becoming the next frontier of new business opportunities. However, commerce on the Internet is seriously hindered by the lack of a common language for collaborative commercial activities. Although Extensible Markup Language (XML) allows trading partners to exchange semantic information electronically, it does not provide support for document routing. In this paper, we describe various inter-organizational electronic commerce applications and discuss their needs for workflow support. Then, we propose a blueprint for XRL, an Extensible Routing Language that enables routing of commercial documents over the Internet and helps in creating truly intelligent documents. This routing language is simple, yet powerful enough to support flexible routing of documents in the Internet environment. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.