This week is RulesFest in San Jose California, at the Dolce Hayes Mansion on the South side of the city (which I think I last visited a decade ago during a dot-com-era company party that involved riding, er, “toilet buggies” around a car park – thats quite enough reminiscing I think).
One of the presentations planned this week is by Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg who wrote the “Decision Model” book, and who are one of the influences for the DMN Decision Modelling standard being worked on (as an OMG RFP) with IBM and Jan van Thienen (Mr Decision Table). One of the things I liked about the KPI model is how it can be viewed as a Goal Network model (albeit more an analytical logical tree in KPI’s view) for organising decision metaphors like decision tables. Such a Goal Network is of course ideal for modelling inference rulesets of the type used in rule engine programming and complex event detection: the goals define the intermediate states and the rule conclusions represent goals that are subgoals in other rules’ conditions.
The interesting thing about the Goal Network is that it applies equally to process design and decision design (where decisions can be decision tables or inference rulesets or anything else). The nice thing about a Goal Network for inference rule engines is that the goal network can be “executed” automatically during “inferencing” or rule engine processing; with decision tables you have to explicitly control the execution path (which of course could be preferable in some scenarios).
I’ve a strong feeling that “goal networks” and their multiple viewpoints are the next interface development area for those bridging the gap between business models and IT.
