ETKnet: A Distributed Network System for Sharing Event Data and Multi-faceted Knowledge in a Collaboration Federation

This chapter presents a distributed event-triggered knowledge network (ETKnet) developed for use by government organizations to share not only data and application operations but also knowledge embedded in organizational and inter-organizational policies, regulations, data, and security constraints as well as collaborative processes and operating procedures. A unified knowledge and process specification language has been developed to formally specify multi-faceted human and organizational knowledge in terms of three types of knowledge rules and rule structures. A user-friendly interface is provided for collaborating organizations to define events of interest as well as automated and manual operations, operation structures, knowledge rules, rule structures, and triggers. Through this interface, these organizations can also perform task management, administrative management, configuration management, and ontology management. Events are published in a global registry for browsing, querying, event subscription, and notification. Rules and rule structures are automatically translated into Web services for discovery and distributed processing in ETKnet. Event data are dots that can be connected dynamically across organizational boundaries through the interoperation of knowledge rules and processes.