A rule warehouse system for knowledge sharing and business collaboration

In collaborative e-business, the business rules of different business partners need to be shared electronically and be used to solve business problems collaboratively. To achieve this, a neutral knowledge representation is needed to translate heterogeneous rules into the neutral representation so that: (1) Pair wise translations between rule representations can be avoided. (2) The collection of rules can be verified to identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and non-termination conditions. In this dissertation, we describe the design and implementation of a Rule Warehouse System (RWS), which allows heterogeneous business rules to be imported and transformed into the neutral knowledge representation, verified to eliminate rule anomalies, and exported for use by some existing rule systems to support collaborative e-business applications. An Active Object Model is used as the neutral knowledge representation for different types of rules commonly recognized in the literature, and several algorithms are developed and implemented for the detection of rule anomalies. The verification process first converts all types of rules into an event-and-action-oriented representation. An algorithm is then applied on the set of transformed rules to detect non-termination conditions. Next, the same set of rules is partitioned based on their associated events before applying algorithms on each partitioned subset to detect inconsistencies and redundancies. These algorithms take into consideration the side effects of methods can be called in rules. An important benefit of an RWS is to integrate the knowledge acquired from different sources to solve problems that cannot be solved by using the knowledge and the rule engine of an individual source. In this dissertation, we describe our work on the integration of a deductive rule engine with an event-and-action-oriented rule engine to demonstrate collaborative problem-solving by using both constraint-oriented and event and-action-oriented rules.

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