I just spent a long weekend in Innsbruck, Austria for the W3C Rule Interchange Format meeting, followed by the European Semantic Web Conference 2007 (ESWC07). I was a little concerned to find that I had booked a room in a 15th century hotel but I needn’t have worried – the rooms had been upgraded to keep pace with modern expectations including internal plumbing, wireless internet access, etc. Indeed, all of Innsbruck was a very pleasant experience: for example, Innsbruck airport’s relaxed check-in contrasted with the chaos of London Gatwick (which seems to be in a constant state of “upgrading”, without seemingly improving on the customer experience). A 45 minute queue for the “fast bag drop” after self-service check-in at 5am implies a dire need for some basic “business intelligence” and simple event processing, never mind CEP…
Rule standards are making progress. Rules are the brains behind CEP (as commented on earlier), while the event infrastructure provides the backbone. The OMG Production Rule Representation (PRR) effort [*1] (as discussed by PRR chair James Taylor) is close to completion as a rule modeling standard for “standard” (data driven) rule engines; the W3C RIF effort has already had an attempt to make it work in the real world (as discussed by Mark Proctor). New at Innsbruck during ESWC was the start of the PR version of RIF work (indeed before the slowly-progressing “RIF Core” has been completed). There was a “frank and vigorous exchange of views” in the first meeting and it became rapidly apparent that there was interest in covering all aspects of “Event Condition Action” rules including a whole new-to-me rule terminology such as action rules, reaction rules, reactive rules, etc, as well as rules for event processing (including both complex and streaming events)…
You might ask: what has PR RIF got to do with the semantic web? Well, the semantic web (a topic we started to discuss in the context of CEP) involves knowledge representation across the internet, and behavioral / operational rules form an important part of the “semantic scene”: its is not good enough to just use semantic technologies to search for information, you also want to act on it as well. And the same holds for CEP: it is not good enough to just recognize events or filter event streams, you need to make decisions on the results too.
Notes:
[*1] Disclaimer: TIBCO is also involved in (as a supporter of) OMG PRR as production rules are key to the representation of business rule representation in CEP. We also support the W3C RIF effort as runtime rule interchange is also going to be interesting for future e-business transactions. TIBCO BusinessEvents uses an advanced event-aware rule engine for (efficient development and processing of) both event correlation rule types and business logic rule types.
