Knowledge sharing in a collaborative business environment

Recent efforts focus on representing human/organizational knowledge in a format suitable for machine processing to enable systematic knowledge sharing among collaborating business organizations. Different types of business rules can be used to capture multi-faceted business policies, strategies, regulations and constraints. A structure of such rules can model business procedures and processes. Interoperation among distributed, heterogeneous rules and rule structures is needed to support collaborative business decision-making and problem solving. In this paper, we introduce a distributed event-trigger-rule-based system for processing distributed events, triggers, heterogeneous business rules and rule structures. Our approach converts heterogeneous business rules and rule structures into code automatically and wraps them as web services for their registration, discovery, invocation, interoperation and reuse in an enhanced web service infrastructure.