Process based storing and reconstructing of XML form documents

Abstract

Recent developments in business practices require companies to communicate frequently with each other. The use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents is essential to ensure the integration of heterogeneous information systems. XML is widely used because of its platform-independence and the ability it offers to separate content from presentation. It is also used as a medium for form documents that are used over the flow of business processes. Recently most business processes have been managed by a software system, the Business Process Management (BPM) system. Change management of XML documents – recording and tracing the history of the documents – is important in e-business environments where multiple companies are involved. In this paper, we propose a new method of storing documents whereby changes are detected automatically and document versions are reconstructed upon user request. In addition, this method has allowed a model to recover documents even after a system error. A prototype system was implemented on top of a workflow system and an experiment was carried out to test the efficiency of our method. Our approach provides efficient storage and convenient management of documents.