The ACSI hub: A data-centric environment for service interoperation

Abstract

The business artifact approach to modeling business processes and web service orchestration is gaining wide attention because it enables a holistic marriage of data and process, that in turn supports an intuitive, top-down view of processes, rich flexibility, and verification in the presence of data. The Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) variant of artifacts provides a declarative approach for specifying artifact lifecycles (that is, possible sequencings of activities relevant to an artifact), and provides the foundation for the recent OMG Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) standard. The ACSI Hub system, open-sourced in 2013 [4], uses the artifact-based approach to support service orchestration, and the demo shows in particular how it works with GSM-based artifacts. The demo shows several capabilities of the ACSI Hub system, including design of the service orchestration schema, configuring of access rights for different participating services, and execution of the overall orchestration as viewed by the participating services. As such, it demonstrates the feasibility and naturalness of using a declarative artifact-based (or case-based) approach for managing flexible service orchestration. Copyright 2014 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.