Y. Liu, Y. Shi, H. Lam, S. Su, K. Pillalamarri, and M. Islamraja (USA)
Rule Warehouse, Business Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Business Rule Verification, Common Rule Representation
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 and 2) the collection of rules can be verified to identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and non-termination conditions. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a Rule Warehouse System, 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. We use an Active Object Model (AOM) as the neutral knowledge representation for different types of rules commonly recognized in the literature, and we develop several algorithms 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.
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