RulesFest is a very friendly conference – short coffee breaks after every 50min session, power and wifi at the tables, and so on. CEP-relevant highlights from today’s sessions included:
- Kenny Shi from EBay presented on their fraud decision system’s use of rules. What was interesting from a decision management perspective was that EBay had classified their decisions by their being synchronous (e.g. part of an explicitly orchestrated process) or asynchronous (e.g. more generally event driven, for asynchronous actions). They had built a custom sequential (non-inferencing) rules engine to do this, rather than use their previous rules technology (IBM JRules) – and suffered some rule complexity issues as a result (with an inferencing rule engine you can split – and therefore re-use – rule components into different rules).
Kenny described some of the interesting stats for their system:
– 65% of their fraud processing time is in data retrieval (although it wasn’t clear why they have not exploited in-memory technology / data preloading to handle this)
– the database (system) calls were described as “latency killers”: for example a 6ms DB call had to be added to a 25ms WAN network hop
– they use 160 application servers for their asynchronous rules (!) and 300 application servers for their synchronous rules (!!)
[See also here] - Emory Fry from the US Navy presented on their “Knowledge Management Architecture For Healthcare”, basically an advanced information sharing engine which also includes event processing capabilities.
[See also here] - Said Tabet – better known for his RuleML leadership, but now at EMC – gave a keynote on “Semantic Technologies and the Cloud”, and won the award for surviving the most scathing comment during his Q&A: “hearing about all these organisations and standards bodies getting involved in cloud deployments discourages me immensely about the future of deploying to the cloud!”.
[See also here] - In the “101” sessions, I gave the standard CEP tutorial as given at a previous OMG workshop (downloadable here).
- Jacob Feldman presented on “Using Constraint Solvers to Validate and Execute Rules-based Decision Models” covered an interesting spread from decision modelling to decision execution via inference rules or constraint rules. More evidence of technology convergence!
[See also here]
