Yearworth M, Battle S
Intelligent Computer Systems Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. my,
Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 1998 Jan;55(1):1-9. doi: 10.1016/s0169-2607(97)00049-7.
Workflow management is a serious concern in any organisation and a clinical laboratory is a particularly good example of where the information system (LIS) needs to be well integrated with the physical system comprising the doctors, technicians and the machines necessary to analyse and report on samples. It is the points of synchronisation between events and decision making in the outside world and control flow inside the information system that constitute the problem domain of workflow management. We propose an extension to the workflow management solution described in the OpenLabs architecture specification in which the emphasis is moved away from an essentially message orientated workflow system to one where the system may reasonably expect to deal with data that includes many different types of information such as images, diagrams, graphs and sound. Our key point is extensibility; the proposed extension of the OpenLabs architecture is able to deal with new data types without significant modification of the workflow management software. Our approach has been based on using some of the desirable features of the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) found in the World Wide Web (WWW) and the use of industry standard object technology based on the Object Management Group's (OMG) Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).
工作流管理是任何组织都极为关注的问题，临床实验室就是一个典型例子，说明信息系统（实验室信息管理系统，LIS）需要与由医生、技术人员以及分析和报告样本所需的机器组成的物理系统良好集成。正是外部世界的事件与决策和信息系统内部的控制流之间的同步点构成了工作流管理的问题域。我们提议对OpenLabs架构规范中描述的工作流管理解决方案进行扩展，将重点从本质上以消息为导向的工作流系统转移到一个系统能够合理预期处理包含图像、图表、图形和声音等多种不同类型信息的数据的系统。我们的关键点是可扩展性；提议的OpenLabs架构扩展能够处理新数据类型，而无需对工作流管理软件进行重大修改。我们的方法基于利用万维网（WWW）中超文本标记语言（HTML）和统一资源定位符（URL）的一些理想特性，以及基于对象管理集团（OMG）的公共对象请求代理体系结构（CORBA）使用行业标准对象技术。
