This article discusses the application of a new variant of high-level Petri nets, the so-called SGML nets, for modeling business processes in the area of Internet-based commerce. SGML nets are designed to capture the process of generating and manipulating structured documents based on the international standard SGML. Since the currently most relevant document standards on the Internet are HTML (an SGML application) and XML (a subset of SGML), SGML nets offer an elegant way to integrate central aspects of Electronic Commerce applications, such as the generation of online product catalogs, processing of online orders, and electronic document interchange between companies, into a unified formal workflow model. The article gives an introduction to the central concepts of SGML nets and includes an example of their application from the area of online order processing.
