以XML為基礎之跨組織工作流程整合架構與其應用

An XML-Based Inter-Organizational Workflow Integration Framework and Its Applications

在當代的商業環境下，可以說是資訊科技促使企業策略變革的年代。從供應鏈管理、企業資源規劃、顧客關係管理以及知識管理等課題受到企業的日益重視，已足以證明：資訊科技已經儼然成為企業增加核心競爭力的不二法門。然而，想要有效地整合電子化企業，首重「企業應用系統整合」 (Enterprise Application Integration, EAI )　，尤其是跨越組織之間的異質性系統整合。其主要功能在解讀並轉換來自異質性系統間不同應用程式的資料，並導入統一的工作流程，藉以整合這些應用程式間的協同運作，提供資料格式的轉換，同步或非同步的自動化流程處理。在本研究中，我們利用XML語言的自我描述功能及跨平台特性，做為電子資料交換的資訊載體，並提出一個以XML為基礎的工作流程系統整合架構。當系統產生所需的XML文件時，會觸發相對應的工作流程程序，在跨組織或異質性系統聞達到資訊傳遞與整合的功能。以XML做為文件主要資訊承載的媒體，可以讓整個過程具有廣泛而多元的表示能力。可以表示的內容包含了：相關公文資訊、流程描述、流程核銷記錄等。並結合系統定義的映對文件轉換規則，同時達到異質性資料庫橫向整合的目的。最後，我們並以一個跨越中華民國海關、經濟部加工出口區管理局，以及加工出口區內廠商的申請工作流程做為範例，來說明整個系統架構的可行性。

The progress and proliferation of information technology inspire a paradigm shift for enterprises to draw up their strategic plans. As today’s enterprises rush to pay more attentions on the topics regarding supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, or even knowledge management, it is obviously that information technology is becoming a core capability for promoting their competitiveness. To effectively integrate different enterprises via the cyberspace, the most important one to be tackled will be Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), especially for inter-organizational system integration. The main purpose is to interpret and transform data in various formats from heterogeneous systems, and then pass them into a unified workf1ow to coordinate the collaborative interoperability among applications either synchronously or asynchronously.
In this paper, we propose a workflow integration framework based on XML, which gains the merits of self-descriptive and platform-independent when it is utilized as a message carrier. Our framework can be tuned to trigger some pre-defined tasks to pass information and integrate the process across heterogeneous systems when the necessary XML documents are generated. The information can be encoded in XML is very versatile, from official documents, process descriptions, to any other types of document formats. Information represented in XML documents will be transformed accordingly conforming to some specific transformation rules to accomplish the horizontal integration among heterogeneous databases. Finally, we present an application process across the ROC Customs, Economic Processing Zone Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, and any enterprise established in the Economic Processing Zone to verify the feasibility of our framework.