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In recent years, business organisations have perceived a growing need to collaborate with one another to solve common problems and to stay competitive. An important form of collaboration is sharing of human/ organisational knowledge. In this work, we use different types of business rules and structures of these rules to capture multi-faceted business policies, strategies, regulations, constraints, processes and operating procedures. The occurrence of any event of interest to these organisations can initiate the processing of multiple rules and rule structures. We present a rule specification language and an event-triggered knowledge sharing system for the specification and processing of distributed events, triggers, heterogeneous business rules and rule structures in an enhanced web service infrastructure.

Much effort is being made by the IT industry towards the development of a Web Service infrastructure to enable the discovery and sharing of heterogeneous applications and data resources. The existing implementation of Web Service registries does not have constraint specification and processing capabilities to achieve intelligent service discovery. In this work, we have extended the Web Service Description Language to allow service providers to specify their service constraints, and developed a Constraint-based Web Service Broker capable of matching a service requestor's requirement specification against providers' constraints to find their desired services. This paper presents the extended Web Service Description Language, the architecture and implementation of the Broker, the constraint matching technique, and the result of a performance evaluation.

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