What is a Workflow?

[cappelaere]

At the OGC OWS-6 Kickoff meeting in Fairfax Virginia this week, Keith
Swenson asked me a very interesting question (although I did not think
so at the time):

In YOUR Opinion, What Is A Workflow?

It does not seem like much of a question but a whole industry is
building on this.
So the question deserves an answer.

Let's ask further questions:

1. Is a shell script scheduling jobs a workflow?
2. Can workflows be written directly in Java, Ruby, Python or Perl...?
3. Is a graphical flowchart required?
4. Should end-users care about workflows? Aren't they Higher level
RPC calls after all? Not very RESTFul...so they should looked at from
a different perspective?

By the way, flat answers (and non personal so please do not refer to
these)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workflow
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/workflow