Integrated Specification and Processing of Knowledge and Process for Achieving Knowledge Sharing among Collaborating Organizations

Today’s government and business organizations face many complex problems and challenges. Effective resource sharing, collaboration and coordination among organizations are needed. Collaborating organizations need to share not only data, but also human and organizational knowledge embedded in organizational and inter-organizational policies, regulations, constraints, processes and operating procedures. This paper presents an XML-based knowledge and process specification language, a user interface tool, and a distributed Event-Triggered Knowledge Network (ETKnet). The language allows policies, regulations and constraints to be specified in terms of three types of rules and structures composed of these rules. The action clause of a condition-action rule allows a process or an operating procedure to be specified in the form of a structure of manual and automated operations having various constructs. The user-interface is meant to ease the user’s task of defining events of common interest, along with rules and rule structures, and outputting the captured knowledge in the specification language. The rules and rule structures in the XML format are automatically translated into program code, wrapped as web services and installed at the defining organizations’ sites. When an event occurs, data associated with the event is sent to the sites that contain applicable rules. ETKnet processes these distributed rules and rule structures uniformly as web services, thus achieving event-triggered knowledge sharing.