ECA-LP / ECA-RuleML: A Homogeneous Event-Condition-Action Logic Programming Language

Event-driven reactive functionalities are an urgent need in nowadays distributed service-oriented applications and (Semantic) Web-based environments. An important problem to be addressed is how to correctly and efficiently capture and process the event-based behavioral, reactive logic represented as ECA rules in combination with other conditional decision logic which is represented as derivation rules. In this paper we elaborate on a homogeneous integration approach which combines derivation rules, reaction rules (ECA rules) and other rule types such as integrity constraint into the general framework of logic programming. The developed ECALP language provides expressive features such as ID-based updates with support for external and self-updates of the intensional and extensional knowledge, transactions including integrity testing and an event algebra to define and process complex events and actions based on a novel interval-based Event Calculus variant.