An extensible knowledge base management system for supporting rule-based interoperability among heterogeneous systems

The main objective of a virtual enterprise (VE) is to allow a number of organizations to rapidly develop a working environment to manage a collection of resources contributed by the organizations toward the attainment of some common goals. One of the key requirements of a tirtua.1 enterprise is to develop an information infrastructure to sup port the interoperability of distributed and heterogeneous systems for controlling and conducting the business of the virtual enterprise. In order to achieve the objective and to meet this requirement, it is necessary to model all things of interest to a virtual enterprise such as data, human and hardware resources, organizational structures, business constraints, production processes, and activities in work management. Additionally, a system is needed to manage the meta-information and the shared data and to provide both build-time and run-time services to the heterogeneous systems to achieve their interoperability. In this paper, we describe the modeling requirements for a virtual enterprise and show how a global, mediated VE conceptual model can be constructed at build-time and be used by a knowledge base management system (KBMS) to provide run-time support for the operation of a virtual enterprise. The KBMS differs from the traditional database management system (DBMS) in that it provides not only the traditional database management services (such as persistent, object management, transaction management, etc.), but also a set of knowledge base management services. Most notably, the KBMS provides a request/event monitoring service which monitors the invocation of the methods which automatically triggers the processing of rules by a rule processing service when certain methods are invoked. We shall also describe how we apply the KBMS technology in the R&D efforts of a project called the National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NHIP) to provide a rule-based interoperabtity among heterogeneous systems. Permission to make digitel/hard copies of all or part of thk material for personal or claasroom use is granted witbout fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the pubhcation and its date appear, and notice is given that copyright is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to repubtieh, to post on aemera or to redistribute to Iiata, requirea specific permission andlor fee. CIKM ’95, Baltimore MD USA @ 1995 ACM 089791 -8124/95/11 ..$3.50 * Acknowledgement: This work is supported by the Advanced Research project Agency under ARPA Order #B76100. It is a part of the R&D effort of the NIIIP Consortium. The ideas and techniques presented here are those of-the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinion of other NIIIP Consortium members.