Processing distributed event data and multifaceted knowledge in a collaboration federation

All nations are facing many global problems, the solutions to which require efficient and effective sharing of distributed, heterogeneous data, knowledge and application systems. We present a way to capture organizations' multi-faceted knowledge by three popular rule types and rule structures, and wrap them as Web services for their registration, discovery and invocation. Distributed data associated with events defined by these organizations are transmitted through a distributed event infrastructure to those sites that contain applicable rules. The processing of heterogeneous rules and application operations specified in rules may add to or modify the event data to produce a dynamic event data set that can be used to support collaborating organizations' decision-making and problem solving. A peer-to-peer architecture of a distributed system and the functions of its components are described. Issues and approaches related to event data evolution and distributed rule and trigger processing are also discussed.