Jeff DePree

Interoperation of Organizational Data, Rules, Processes and Services for Achieving Inter-Organizational Coordination and Collaboration

Solutions to many complex problems that government organizations all over the world face today require these organizations to share, not only data and computing resources,but also policies, constraints, regulations, processes and services in order to achieve inter-organizational coordination and collaboration. This paper presents an integrated specification language and a user interface for collaborating government organizations to specify events of common interest, policies,constraints and regulations in the form of different types of knowledge rules, manual and automated services, and sharable workflow processes. A network system infrastructure for dynamic processing and interoperation of distributed rules and processes, and an event-triggered rule processing and process enactment technique are also described.

Dynamic construction and processing of inter-organisational business processes

For business organisations to survive and compete successfully in the growing global economy, they must collaborate with one another and share not only the data, but also human and organisational knowledge captured in business rules, business processes and manual and automated operations. These organisational resources must be used to dynamically construct and process inter-organisational business processes to accommodate changes in different business environments. This paper presents an integrated business rule and process specification and a user interface tool for the specification of organisational resources. It also presents an event-triggered knowledge network system, which automatically translates different types of business rules and business processes into code and wraps the code as web services for uniform processing in a web service infrastructure. The system provides an event-triggered processing mechanism, which enables the integration and interoperation of business data, rules, processes and operations and the dynamic construction and processing of inter-organisational business processes.

Ontology management in an event-triggered knowledge network

This paper presents an ontology management system and ontology processing techniques used to support a distributed event-triggered knowledge network (ETKnet), which has been developed for deployment in a national network for rapid detection and reporting of crop disease and pest outbreaks. The ontology management system, called Lyra, is improved to address issues of terminology mapping, rule discovery, and large ABox inference. A domain ontology that covers the concepts related to events, rules, roles and collaborating organizations for this application in ETKnet was developed. Terms used by different organizations can be located in the ontology by terminology searching. Services that implement knowledge rules and rule structures can be discovered through semantic matching using the concepts defined in the ontology. A tableau algorithm was extended to lazy-load only the needed instances and their relationships into main memory. With this extension, Lyra is capable of processing a large ontology database stored in secondary storage even when the ABox cannot be entirely loaded into memory.

Distributed processing of event data and multi-faceted knowledge in a collaboration federation

This paper presents the goal, accomplishments and research issues of an NSF project. The project aims to develop a distributed event-triggered knowledge sharing network (ETKnet) for government organizations to share, not only data and application operations, but also knowledge embedded in organizational and inter-organizational policies, regulations, data and security constraints as well as collaborative processes and operating procedures. A unified knowledge and process specification language has been developed to formally specify multi-faceted human and organizational knowledge in terms of three types of knowledge rules and rule structures. A user-friendly interface is provided for collaborating organizations to define events of interest as well as application operations, knowledge rules, rule structures and triggers. Events are published in a global registry for browsing, querying, event subscription and notification. Rules and rule structures are automatically translated into Web services for distributed processing in ETKnet. Event data are dots that can be connected dynamically across organizational boundaries through the interoperation of knowledge rules, processes and application operations.

ETKnet: A Distributed Network System for Sharing Event Data and Multi-faceted Knowledge in a Collaboration Federation

This chapter presents a distributed event-triggered knowledge network (ETKnet) developed for use by government organizations to share not only data and application operations but also knowledge embedded in organizational and inter-organizational policies, regulations, data, and security constraints as well as collaborative processes and operating procedures. A unified knowledge and process specification language has been developed to formally specify multi-faceted human and organizational knowledge in terms of three types of knowledge rules and rule structures. A user-friendly interface is provided for collaborating organizations to define events of interest as well as automated and manual operations, operation structures, knowledge rules, rule structures, and triggers. Through this interface, these organizations can also perform task management, administrative management, configuration management, and ontology management. Events are published in a global registry for browsing, querying, event subscription, and notification. Rules and rule structures are automatically translated into Web services for discovery and distributed processing in ETKnet. Event data are dots that can be connected dynamically across organizational boundaries through the interoperation of knowledge rules and processes.