ETKnet

Intellectual merits

First, the extended Rule Markup Language will contribute to the effort of the RuleML community in developing a standard language for organizations to specify and share policies, regulations, processes and constraints expressed in terms of high-level declarative rules. Second, the resulting techniques, algorithms, methodologies and infrastructure will significantly advance the state of arts of information and knowledge management because problems related to the sharing of dynamic event data and the interoperation among distributed, heterogeneous knowledge rules have not been fully investigated. Third, the proposed ontology-enhanced and constraint-based Web Service registry will significantly improve the quality of discovery and invocation of registered rules, rule structures, and application system operations. By converting heterogeneous rules and rule structures into Web Services, we will not need different types of rule engines to process them. All we need is a single rule server that invokes them as Web Services to achieve collaborative problem-solving. Fourth, the integration of a domain ontology with data entities and meta-data that describe events and rules in an ontology database and the development of an Ontology Manager will allow efficient and effective querying for and reasoning about concepts and conceptual relationships in order to resolve semantic discrepancies between data entities and terms used by different producers or users of events, triggers and rules.

Broader Impacts

First, the R&D results will be applied and evaluated by a federation of collaborating organizations in the NPDN environment. The deployment of the resulting collaborative system and tools at the regional and national centers of NPDN will have an immediate application to and impact on these organizations because they will be timely informed of any disease or pest outbreak and receive guided assistance on appropriate emergency response resulting from the application of knowledge rules. Second, events, multifaceted knowledge specifications and application operations registered in the Web Service registry capture collaborating organizations’ policies, regulations, processes and constraints. The contents of the registry can be used to educate and train the members of a collaboration federation. In a separate research effort, the investigators are collaborating on the development of an e-learning system and tools, which can make use of the registry contents for education and training purposes. Third, since the developed infrastructure and technologies are general, they can be used by other collaboration federations to solve other global problems.