A Distributed Event-triggered Knowledge Sharing System for Agricultural Homeland Security

Government agencies globally are facing problems like illegal immigration, terrorism, and disease diagnostics and control. Solutions to these problems rely heavily on collaborating organizations' ability to effectively and efficiently share not only data but also knowledge embedded in organizational and inter-organizational policies, regulations, data and security constraints, processes and procedures. The United States Department of Agriculture has launched a multi-year national project to build the National Plant Diagnostic Network (NPDN) for strengthening the homeland security protection of food and agriculture by connecting five regional plant diagnostic centers with a national center. Complementing this effort, our research team has been developing a web-based, distributed system for event-triggered knowledge sharing among NPDN organizations. We capture multi-faceted knowledge using three types of rules and rule structures. A user-friendly interface is provided for collaborating organizations to define events of interest as well as knowledge rules and publish them in a global registry for browsing, querying, event subscription and notification, and processing. Event data are the dots that can be connected across organizational boundaries through the interoperation of knowledge rules and rule structures.