RuleML09 was co-located (and partially consecutively with) BRForum09 this year, and TIBCO presented a keynote on day 2 on why rules matter in CEP . RuleML is more of an academic conference covering things like rule standards (such as W3C RIF and OMG SBVR), and had an event processing track too.
I hadn’t twigged before now that a title like “Rules Matter in CEP” could be misinterpreted in a “rule markup language conference” as “CEP uses a new way of representing rule fragments we call Rule Matter” – but luckily no-one seemed to have been misled… although I must admit it might be a neat name for a rule format :).
It was good to see all the “great and good” in current rules and standards research at this event, although there was not much overlap with the “great and good” who had attended ORF the previous week. It seems strange having 3 rules conferences in 2 weeks, although I do wonder if the other vendors in EPTS will be cursing me for possibly raising CEP as a future mainstream topic at these events.
Some of the Q&A was interesting. For example, why should “rule inferencing” be important (i.e. algorithmic rule chaining over using events to cause other rules to fire). My rule engine industry colleagues from IBM Ilog wanted to know why their rules engine wasn’t represented on the list of CEP vendors (answers on a postcard, please). And why weren’t other algorithms like Bayesian networks used more in CEP (good question…).
