Meta-rule enhanced interoperation of operations, rules and processes for achieving dynamic inter-organizational collaboration

In today's complex and changing world, government and business organizations need to reuse and share not only data and computing facilities, but also organizational policies, constraints, regulations and processes in order to achieve inter-organizational collaboration and coordination. Organizational resources as well as organizations' partnership can change at any time in a dynamic environment. Thus, inter-organizational processes must be flexible. This paper presents an integrated rule and process specification language for specifying collaborating organizations' resources, and a meta-rule enhanced, event-triggered, distributed rule processing and process enactment technique to achieve the interoperation of operations, rules and processes, and the dynamic construction and processing of inter-organizational processes. The language and the processing technique are used to implement and evaluate USDA's Standard Operating Procedure for demonstrating the collaboration among involved organizations in the event of a plant disease or pest outbreak.