SimpleBPEL: Simplified Modeling of BPEL Workflows for Scientific End Users

Abstract

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is a reasonable choice for modeling workflows in a web service environment, but it has a high acceptance threshold for users with no workflow skills. To improve the usability of BPEL for non-tech savvy scientific end users, we present SimpleBPEL, a modeling tool for composing workflows of SimpleBPEL fragments that encapsulate BPEL logic. The implementation is based on Eclipse and automatically generates standard-compliant BPEL workflows. A usage example from the area of media research shows the usefulness of the presented approach.