vincent
11-13-2008 08:20 AM
Although we contributed one session (on
PRR and decisions) to the RuleML conference co-hosted with BR Forum this year, I missed some of the other but nontheless significant talks. I see the keynotes are
now officially published, so below are some reviews of the presentations from the web:
- Michael Kifer of F-logic fame presented on the W3C RIF Rule Interchange Format. This is a nice intro to RIF, by one of its main authors. Interestingly RIF is the logical (pun unintended) successor to much of the old RuleML research work on logic language markups, although somehow I doubt we’ll see RIF08 next year instead. My only contrary thought about this presentation is that, for the wider audience, it could have listed some of the other rule / logic languages currently in progress in the R&D communities, and how they might fit in a hierarchy of RIF dialects.
- Paul Haley of Automata presented on the need for a merged ontology for process, rules, events and state, extending the ideas he presented in the BRForum session earlier. This presentation directly addressed the CEP community, too:
- The knowledge management handled by the BRMS community should also impact CEP and BPM…
- For example, see TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager (although we don’t make any specific claims around knowledge management per se, you can see where Paul was heading here).
- The integration of rules and process is currently inadequate, with rules playing 2nd fiddle to process
- Funnily enough there was a similar discussion at this week’s BPM Think Tank in the context of semantic BPM versus say rule representations of process (e.g. for the purposes of say verification of process steps, looking for redundancy, etc).
- Questions whether TIBCO will build a BRMS to compete in BPM…
- TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager already provides a BRMS for event-driven automated processes…
- PRR is inadequate but probably more important than RIF
- Certainly PRR 1.0, sans expression language, is “inadequate” compared to what it should provide with a common expression language. To be fair, RIF PRD can be considered (loosely) to be PRR compatible (and mappings should be straightforward), and hopefully they will remain in sync. But PRR could help bridge the semantic gap - for example be used in both CEP and BPM (and SOA) models.
- Natural language or spreadsheet metaphors are critical
- So far, TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager supports the latter.
- There is a need for semantic BPM and semantic CEP
- Researchers tend to agree here, but the customer benefits still need to be proven. Another PhD topic?
- When will major BPM/CEP/rule vendors have ontologies?
- Arguably only TIBCO fits in this group (with IBM and Oracle being only “minor” and “too new” in some of these categories). And we are probably more interested in customer / domain ontologies rather than cross-computing-platform ontologies. So far.
- Ben Grosof of Vulcan presented his latest knowledge representation project, SILK. I didn’t get to speak to Ben about the importance of time and events in knowledge representations, and these are not really covered in his presentation, but I got the impression Ben does understand this.
- David Luckham of Stanford presented on CEP. David probably should have done a keynote for the main Business Rules Forum rather than just present to the rule markup community. Oh well, maybe next year…
The
other presentations are up too. I won’t go through all of them, but in particular note Mark Linehan’s talk on
an ontology for time (and thence an ideal basis for a business-level CEP language), and Harold Boley and Ben Craig’s
personal agents (using distributed rule systems like BusinessEvents allows). Mark Linehan won the best paper award, justifiably, for
his work on mapping SBVR rules (i.e. business policy constraints) to UML classes and
OCL (i.e. object constraints) - which will be interesting to compare with Microsoft’s research work in this area.
Source...
11-13-2008
