以XML為基礎的流程圖知識表示法

Abstract

工作流程，可以直接解釋為在某一程序中工作的流程。流程圖（flowchart）則為一個用來表達某些工作流程的圖形。在這篇論文中，我們提出一個以XML為表示語言的流程圖表示法—XFlowchart，且利用XML所提供的文件格式定義（DTD）以掌控流程圖的本體涵義，不僅有助於淬取隱藏於流程圖中的知識，且有助於重複使用流程圖的結構。為此，我們也提出了一個包含有前置處理與建構兩階段的建構XFlowchart的系統架構；其中，在建構階段，為了提高XFlowchart的元件重複使用率，我們發展了一個以物件導向技術並配合以元件為基礎的XFlowchart建置系統雛形。另外，在前置處理階段中，對於一個含有GOTO指令的非結構化流程圖，我們提出一套轉換機制，以便將該流程圖轉換為結構化的流程圖。同時，為了達到顯示流程圖的目的，我們也討論了數種顯示XFlowchart的機制。最後，我們提出一個完整的範例用以說明如何實際使用XFlowchart。

The Workflow which can be interpreted as the flow of work throughout a process is self-explanatory and a flowchart is a graph representing some flow of the work. This thesis presents XFlowchart –a new flowchart representation in XML. XFlowchart uses DTD of XML to handle the ontology of the flowchart that is not only useful for the knowledge acquisition of the hidden knowledge but also useful for reuse of structure of the flowchart. We also propose a two-phase XFlowchart building system, including pre-processing phase and constructing phase. In constructing phase, a component-based XFlowchart prototype system is developed by object-oriented approach that promotes the reusability of the XFlowchart’s components. For a non-structured flowchart, a flowchart with GOTO instruction, a transformation algorithm is proposed in pre-processing phase to transform it to a structured flowchart. For the sake of displaying flowchart, several XFlowchart displaying schemes are also described in this thesis. Finally, a complete example is given to demonstrate the practicability of XFlowchart.