Lynx: An Open Email Extension for Workflow Systems Based on Web Services and its Application to Digital Government

We introduce Lynx, a new email extension for workflow systems based on Web Services. Web service based workflows provide support for aggregating web services into new higher-level web services by means of process composition. This approach does not usually support direct interaction with people. On the other hand, traditional collaboration tools like email or instant messaging do not provide the necessary support for structured business processes. Lynx provides a web service through which a workflow application can interact with human partners via an email based forms interface without requiring a specialized client. We constructed a Lynx prototype and tested it with the ActiveBPEL engine. User interaction is achieved by means of XForms dynamically generated by Java classes dynamically loaded based on the XML schema of the documents exchanged. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach in a Digital Government scenario.