If you were wondering about the slow pace of workflow standards development in general -- and the advent of common XML schemas in particular -- you're not alone. Some interesting news arrives, though, in the advent of the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), a fast-moving initiative that began this summer and is already seeing the light of day in commercial products. The work is presently more e-commerce focused, and the real intent is to smooth Web Services adoption. But applications for Web content workflows are fairly obvious: most content approval paths are really just collections of business processes...
Check out the Business Process Modeling Initiative (BPMI)