Event-triggered data and knowledge sharing among collaborating government organizations

ABSTRACT

Solving complex global problems such as illegal immigration, border control, and terrorism requires government organizations at all levels to share not only data but, more importantly, knowledge pertinent to decision support, problem solving and activity coordination. Responding to an emergency often requires organizational and inter-organizational policies and complex operating procedures to be followed. In this work, we focus on the sharing of data associated with events of interest to collaborating organizations. Condition-action-alternative-action rules, logic/derivation rules, and constraint rules are used to define organizational and inter-organizational policies, regulations, and data and security constraints. Structures of these heterogeneous rules are used to capture organizational processes and operating procedures. A distributed event-triggered knowledge sharing system enables the interoperation of distributed, heterogeneous rules and rule structures on the data associated with each event occurrence so that all data pertinent to the event occurrence can be generated and delivered to relevant organizations. Presented in this paper are: 1) the system architecture and the distributed event and rule processing strategy, 2) algorithms used for the translation of heterogeneous rules and rule structures into web services for their uniform and efficient processing in a web service infrastructure and 3) issues and solutions related to event data aggregation, conflicting rules, and cyclic rules. The developed user interface tool and system are for deployment in the USDA's National Plant Diagnostics Network to strengthen the homeland security protection of this nation's food and agriculture.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.2 Types of Systems
          Subjects: Decision support (e.g., MIS)

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Experimentation, Human Factors, Management, Performance, Reliability, Security, Standardization

Keywords:
collaborative federation, decision support, event- and rule-based systems, knowledge representation and sharing, web services