Implementing an Active Functionality Service on Different Platforms - An Event-Condition-Action Approach to Enforce Business Rules Execution

Business requirements are changing faster than applicationscan be created or adapted. Most of these requirements are relatedto business rules. Business rules are precise statements thatdescribe, constrain and control the structure, operations andstrategy of a business. Traditionally, business rules have beenscattered, hard-coded and replicated by different applications. Asa result, it has been difficult to adapt them to new requirementsquickly. In recent years, there has been a trend to extenddatabases with powerful rule-processing capabilities leading toso-called active databases. They rely on Event-Condition-Actionrules (ECA-rules) to provide automatic execution of predefinedoperations in response to the occurrence of certain events. Thegoal of this work is to provide a flexible ECA-rule processingfunctionality in order to support the requirements of opendistributed heterogeneous environments. This mechanism isimplemented as a separate, autonomous and flexible activefunctionality service. This is materialized as a service-basedarchitecture which is founded on three main pillars: anontology-based infrastructure, event notifications andservice-oriented principles.