Towards Content-Oriented Integration for Process-Centric Knowledge Management Systems

Workflow Management System (WfMS) which focuses on controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes management is extensively used in Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). But traditional WfMS only work with complete processes on the basis of process models and therefore fail to support a large class of knowledge intensive business processes such as content-oriented integration. In this paper, a service-oriented framework supporting effective content-oriented integration for process-centric KMS is proposed. This framework uses a hybrid process-driven navigation mechanism including content-oriented high-level process and content fragments-oriented micro process. Representational State Transfer (REST) based interface is used to interact with outer entities to increase flexibility and extensibility in constructing complex knowledge intensive applications. A content-oriented services activation and composition meta-data model is given to map relationships among processes, services and related content and its fragments which is used to activate corresponding processes and transform service context into message exchange objects transmitted in enterprise service bus. Finally, the overview, design and implementation of the prototype system are illustrated.