A Software Architecture for Centralized Management of Structured Documents in a Cooperative Editing Workflow

Nowadays, electronic documents are widely used as media of exchange between actors involved in a given business process. Generally, their contents provide information on both what has already been done on this procedure and what remains to be done and by whom it should be done. Badouel and Tchoupe proposed a modelling of the life cycle of such documents through an administrative workflow in which, each of the participants manipulates a partial replica of the document representing at some point, the current state of the process execution; the overall state of the process being obtained by merging different partial replicas. This paper presents a modular software architecture for the implementation and management of such workflow systems.