Last Sunday I left Stockholm for a six weeks long visit of the BPM group at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) in Brisbane, Australia. On my way to Brisbane I stopped for a couple of days in Tokyo to visit John Mettraux, who is the main driving force behind OpenWFE – one of the open source workflow management systems I evaluated recently.
John had invited me to join him on a meeting of the BPM interest group in Tokyo, called BPMinna, and give a short presentation of YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language – the language and open source WFMS developed by the research groups of Prof. Wil van der Aalst and Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede from QUT and TUE). The meeting took place in Shibuya (“one of the busiest places in Tokyo”) last Monday evening. It was organised by Wakizaka-san from Cosolva and hosted by iKnow. It started with a brief demo of iKnow’s product (which is a software product for supporting the teaching and learning of English for Japanese speaking people), followed by my presentation of YAWL (which can be downloaded here YAWL-Tokyo-July08-2.zip), and a presentation of the latest news on OpenWFEru (Ruote for short, i.e. the Ruby version of OpenWFE) given by John. The meeting attracted 25 attenders, both developers and business analysts, from companies such as IT Frontier Corporation, Oracle, Casio, Toshiba etc. The other two presentations were given in Japanese.
The meeting continued with a social dinner in a traditional Japanese restaurant which I was invited to. I would like to express my thanks to John Mettraux for inviting me to this meeting, to Wakizaka-san both for organising the meeting and for translating and annotating my presentation to Japanese, and to BPMinna for showing interest in YAWL and for a delicious dinner.
The second day of my visit was spent on discussions on WFMS with John. John also helped me with installing Ruote on my machine, as I am intending to having a look of it during the time in Australia.
John, thanks for your time and great hospitality!