Towards monitored data consistency and business processing based on declarative software agents

Currently Web systems usually involve application and database servers that support user interfaces and static distributed databases. However, applications such as e-commerce require data and service networks that contain many types of active content and dynamic business processes. In this context, a key challenge has been to manage data content and business processes in a flexible way, often in real-time, through operations which augment, refine, interconnect, ensure consistency, and monitor data and processes. In this paper we present an approach to monitor data consistency and business processing based on declarative agents. Because of its declarative nature, the approach facilitates the use, programming and management of such agent-based systems and allows for different distributed database and Web user interface structures to be interoperable. The approach also relates business events to technical events while conveying to the users meaningful business events, and agents that deal with various levels of abstraction of a business object, that can orchestrate and monitor data change and business processing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.