One important feature for the current and next generation of information systems is the ability to cooperate. Information systems that are able to cooperate are referred to as cooperative information systems. The problem of moving the state of the art from information systems designed as islands of automation to cooperative information systems has primarily been addressed by the distributed artificial intelligence community and the database community.
For example, the distributed artificial intelligence community has investigated cooperation strategies such as task sharing and result sharing, whereas the database community has developed techniques for interoperability over heterogeneous databases. One characteristic of cooperative information systems is that no individual solution can satisfactorily support all required characteristics of cooperative information systems.
This thesis takes the position that a synthesis of results from the distributed artificial intelligence community and the database community is a promising direction for developing cooperative information systems. In this thesis, active capability (as defined within active databases) is considered as an important core technology for cooperative information systems.
Active capability is supported by event condition action (ECA) rules with the following semantics: when an event E occurs, evaluate condition C, and if the condition is satisfied, then execute action A. The applicability of using ECA rules has primarily been explored within database systems and has recently initiated ECA related research within other research communities such as real-time and workflow.
This thesis focuses on what is required in an interface between information systems when using an active capability approach to supporting the major cooperation strategies as formulated in distributed artificial intelligence. The significance of the work reported in this thesis concerns two major issues.
First, advanced types of cooperation strategies such as task sharing and result sharing can now span the domains of database and distributed artificial intelligence architectures. Second, as this work synthesizes and extends results from two different research communities, it provides a good foundation for using active capability as one of the core technologies for cooperative information systems.
