A manual start and manual termination of a task count as manual tasks. The work performed in a manual task is mostly under the control of a human agent, and as such WFMS support for these tasks is limited. Automatic tasks can be started by the system and carried out by the system. A further division between interactive and non interactive automatic tasks can be made, depending on whether a human agent uses the program associated with the task interactively during the execution of the task. A WFMS contains two kinds of data - application data and process data .
Application data is produced and consumed by the various tasks in a workflow.
This application data can be distinguished into structured, unstructured and semi-structured data , based on how easy it is to use the data for process specification. Process data is the necessary information to control and define the execution of workflows - for example the state of tasks. Tasks are assigned to agents who carry them out. With the ad hoc approach human agents determine the correct execution during the workflow execution and with the formal approach valid activity sequences are defined during workflow modeling time by the workflow designer. The workflows are primarily composed of manual tasks and unstructured ore semi-structured data elements, such as documents.