The agenda for the OMG Business Rules Standards Symposium in June has been published: it covers a wide gamut of business-related rule standards/standards-in-progress from BMM (motivations, policies), through to SBVR (documentation/formalisation), PRR (production rule models for BREs) and DMN (decision models), then W3C RIF (rule interchange) and OWL (ontology).
From an event processing perspective, the domains of “decisioning in event processing” and “business rules” certainly overlap somewhat. TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager, for example, provides managed decisions that are driven by event detection (and is one of the most recent “rule management” introductions from a major software vendor).
Business rule standards can impact a number of touchpoints in event processing, as we covered in a presentation to the Dagstuhl workshop, such as:
- BMM: define the strategy and policies that an event processing system should assist with
- SBVR: defines the business ontology / vocabulary, and associated business constraints, against which events are matched and applied respectively
- DMN: defines the decisions used in processes to support policies in event-driven applications
- PRR: defines the production rules, optionally event-driven, used to represent policy, business rule and decision logic
- RIF: defines the interchange format for rules representing basic logic, or even production rules and ECA rules
The standards community for the “rules and decisions” domain is still quite small compared to the impact such decisions and rules have in general IT – just think how many business rules direct BPM design, or how many decisions are made in BPM systems. Major vendors cooperating in the standards efforts include both IBM and TIBCO; FICO recently rejoined the PRR effort and Oracle is contributing to RIF. Perhaps the time for standards has come!
Disclosure: TIBCO is contributing the presentation on Production Rules and Decisioning.
