RuleML2010 co-hosted with bbc2010 a panel on “Rules on the Web” – this was moderated by Said Tabet and included Mark Proctor (of the open source Drools), Benjamin Grosof (of research system Sylk), Prof. Adrian Paschke (from FU Berlin and co-cochair of the EPTS Reference Architecture group), and Monica Palmerani (from University of Bologna, and from whom I learnt the existance of an OASIS LegalXML standard). The panel was apparently meant to be about standards (which were well covered in a previous session anyway) so my contribution to the panel concentrated on the title: what is the relevance of “web” to “rules”. My 2-minute topic coverage implied that there was still plenty of scope for web and/or cloud-based business modelling (think rule storage and modelling), whereas execution of rules was already pretty distributed as-required.
I expanded on this at the RuleML2010 / local Semantic Web group meeting in the evening, “Where Web Rule Research Meets Industry”, covering some of the use cases in rule-driven CEP and some of the other areas of interest, namely:
- Knowledge modelling in some co-operative, web-based way. Imagine using some cloud service to access design patterns and rule templates that you could easily refactor for your particular business ontology / object model…
- Machine learning and classifying mechanisms: discovering new event patterns from past data and events as they occur, allowing dynamic ontology development and assistance.
The other speaker was Benjamin Grosof, who presented a fascinating insight into the roles of rules in representing complex financial instruments under the title Financial Risk Management.
Thanks to the organisers for an interesting event!
