Specification of Forms Processing and Business Procedures for Office Automation

Abstract

Business activities, in general, involve data processing (such as queries, extraction, manipulation, and restructuring of data, etc.) as well as conventional office work centered around preparation, distribution, and filing and retrieval of documents. Convinced that most of these activities can be expressed in terms of forms, we present in this paper a formal means for specification of forms processing. The underlying concept is that business functions can be decomposed into meaningfully connected form processes where each process either produces or modifies a form. Powerful constructs are provided so that most of the common data processing activities can be expressed in a very high level, concise, and yet compilable manner. Using forms processing as a foundation, we then present a facility for business procedure definition. Its goal is to specify meaningful connections among predefined form processes (e.g., when to trigger a process and where to route the result, etc.) so that well structured, routine or semiroutine business procedures can be automated. Copyright © 1982 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.