Abstract: An information management system for managing workflows comprises a syntactic and semantic data entity type definition (1214) for each data entity type, and a data entity definition (1216) for each data entity (1250), each of which contains a subset of the information to be processed by a workflow. Tool definitions (1208) define tools (1254) that execute data processing tasks in a tool server (1222). Tool input binders (1210) and tool output binders (1212) bind tool inputs or outputs to a specific data entity type. A workflow definition (1202, 1202?) comprises one or more workflow input definitions (1204, 1204?) and workflow output definitions (1206, 1206?). The workflow input and output definitions collectively define a data flow network from the input of the workflow to the output of the workflow via one or more instances of tool definitions (1208).