—Towards a data-centric workflow approach, we introduce an artifact model to capture data and workflow management activities in distributed settings. The model is built on Active XML, i.e., XML trees including Web service calls. We argue that the model captures the essential features of business artifacts as described informally in [1] or discussed in [2]. To illustrate, we briefly consider the monitoring of distributed systems and the verification of temporal properties for them. Keywords-Active XML, database, workflow, artifact, documents