Business Rules Forum 2008: Upper Ontology for Events, Processes, States, Rules

[iBot]

vincent
10-29-2008 07:19 PM
Paul Haley, no doubt somewhat bemused that his old company (still using his name) is now under the Oracle banner, presented his proposal for the development of an upper ontology joining together the concepts of events (and event processing), process, state and rules.

Not surprisingly, given that TIBCO is here presenting event processing in a business rules conference, and is a vendor of a leading BPM product, this is somewhat relevant to us. Points covered included:

• Few rules are used to drive processes to make them dynamic; normally BPM vendors concentrate on single-execution point decision services.
  That is a fair point, but at TIBCO we would point to iProcess Conductor, and even BusinessEvents CEP being used to control iProcess workflows.
• Conventional rule systems languages don’t handle temporal aspects very well.
  Again, true. Paul’s example was the statement “underwriting precedes approval“, which seems more to me to define a process diagram constraint rather than something a BRMS would handle.*
• Process people know about events, they just don’t dwell on them.
  I think this quip went wa-a-a-y over the heads of the audience…
• Decisions ignore process state.
  More likely, the process state is implicit in the decision service. Which certainly implies a potential for issues with re-use and maintenance.
• The semantics of process, state, rule and event are not joined, but need to be.
  That is Paul’s thesis.</p>
  • He commented further on the lack of semantic progress (bravely, considering the SBVR experts in the room) with the example that Siebel represents money types as an amount, currency, and time. The latter is needed as conversions between currencies are time-dependent.
  • I had always thought semantic-meeting-of-the-minds was the role of OMG BPDM, proposed as the “semantic BPMN 2.0″. But BPDM’s capability to model state and rules (and probably continuous events) is still unproven, AFAIK.

Paul tag’s this area as a whole as “Semantic Corporate Performance Management”.



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