• IE interfaces
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• v.16 no.spc
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• pp.49-54
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• 2003

In e-business environment, business processes inevitably get more entangled and entail collaboration between distributed and heterogeneous platforms that are not easy to manage. Therefore, systematic and automated management of business process execution has drawn a great concern among companies that necessitate collaborative business processes. The concept of workflow inheritance enables abstraction, polymorphism and reusability of processes, and therefore contributes to extending and executing the processes effectively. We analyze various types of interoperation between business processes, and identify 6 primitive interoperability patterns. We propose a method for extensible collaborative process composition using workflow inheritance and provide collaborative workflow between business processes using web services.