Principles of Elastic Processes

by Schahram Dustdar, Yike Guo, Benjamin Satzger, and Hong-Linh Truong

Process automation and workflows are familiar concepts in modern computer science. Increasingly, data-intensive applications play a crucial role in this domain — our online and interconnected society produces massive amounts of data. Sources include sensor-equipped environments, such as smart buildings, social media, and financial markets. To harvest the valuable information hidden in these "data blobs," we can often apply the concept of processes to streamline data processing and analytical steps. Currently, we can apply such processes for both static and real-time data from different sources and deliver the analytical results within a structured enterprise computing environment. However, we argue that such a computing paradigm lacks some necessary features for modern Internet-scale information processing, where both cloud and human computing are heavily employed. FULL ARTICLE (login required) »