| Enabling government organizations to solve complex global problems such as illegal immigration, border control, and terrorism or business organizations to maintain a globally competitive edge, requires these organizations to collaborate and share not only data and application system resources, but also knowledge that captures organizational and inter-organizational policies, constraints, regulations, processes and procedures. In our study, we focus on the research and development of a knowledge specification language and the techniques, algorithms, system and infrastructure for the sharing of knowledge among collaborating organizations.We represent knowledge using three types of rules: condition-action-alternative-action rules, logic-based derivation rules, or integrity constraints, and structures of these rules. We introduce an XML-based language that enables the specification and sharing of multi-faceted knowledge. Collaborating organizations can specify events of importance, data associated with those events, and rules and rule structures that should be triggered upon the occurrences of those events. We develop a distributed event- and rule-based system called ETKnet for event notification, event data transmission and aggregation, and processing of distributed rules, rule structures, triggers, automated application system operations and manual operations. Data associated with an event occurrence and generated by triggered rules, rule structures and automated/manual operations can thus be shared and used by collaborating organizations for their decision-making and problem-solving. Our approach to achieve the interoperation of heterogeneous rules is to translate rules and rule structures into program code and wrap them as web services for their uniform representation, discovery and invocation in a web service infrastructure.This dissertation presents the system architecture, the distributed event and rule processing strategy, algorithms used for the translation of heterogeneous rules and rule structures into web services, implementation details, and issues and solutions related to event data aggregation, conflicting rules, and cyclic rules. |
