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.