vincent
01-09-2009 06:15 AM
Next week sees the first 2009 get-together for rule standards developers, with the W3C Rule Interchange Format meeting to continue development of the Production Rule Dialect (among others). RIF PRD aims to provide a common rule representation for things like XML-based Domain Specific Languages (mostly for potential future versions of domain standards like XBRL, MISMO and ACORD, but possibly useful also for IT languages like BPEL).

Of course, production rules are relevant to complex event processing, as well as business rules, hence TIBCO’s interest. The shift here is that, with the recent take-over of Ilog by IBM, and with the meeting being hosted by Oracle, the contributors are nowadays the main infrastructure software players and rivals (TIBCO, IBM, Oracle). This shift does not seem to have been particularly commented on by the analyst community yet…

Other CEP connections to RIF are in the academic community: one of the PRD authors is Prof Paschke of Free University Berlin, a CEP researcher. And a recent comment on W3C RIF by Prof Kowalski at Imperial College London was interesting due to Prof Kowalski’s earlier work in the 1980s (!) on event calculus; the shift here is the feasibility of generalized event processing software brought about by the higher performance computer systems and networks in the intervening decades…



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