Business rules and decision tables workshop

This event took place in Dortmund, at the university of applied sciences. I had an invited talk there with my IDS Scheer colleague Dr. Markus Fischer. We basically explained the ARIS approach in building business rule-enhanced applications by integrating business process management with business rule management. we motivated the use of business rules in BPM and showed conceptually how they allow increasing business flexibility and business agility. Another aspect is business control, by outsourcing decisions from business processes and modeling these in deicated ARIS business rule models. We also further explained how the ARIS Business Rules Designer (ABRD) tool shall fit into the ARIS BPM lifecycle and introduced in our talk how process monitoring techniques can be used to monitor business rule execution as a mean of controlling business and making it better.

we got a quite a few questions from the professionals in the attendency about how the alogorithms work underneath the GUI and how the engine optimizes and discovers inconsistencies in the decision tables. This is normal becaus ethe attendency were actually business rules and decision table specialists such as Prof. Horst Strunz. Prof. Strunz gave an enlightning talk about the beginnings of business rules and thnaks to this pioneer, I now understand a lot more about the histrory of a techniques for which international standards have been written already in the seventies.

the other interesting talks were among others, some application cases by students of the european master in project management directed by Pro. Reusch who has also more than ten years experience in the decision tables domain. Then came the talk by a colleague from LF-ET, a partner of Software AG, who presented their approach for decision tables and has shown what functionalities were integrated in theor tooling. He also talked about new directions of work by opening the use of LF-ET to other application systems than Software AG's. LF-ET have quite a big range of references in Germany. I have seen a couple of nice functionalities in the tool, which I think are nice for the user. Unfortunately I didn't come to discuss with the guy from LF-ET because I had some small talk with other attendees.

Through the workshop, I got to know about one tool, apparently very recent, called common knowledge studio, an australian company. Although I thought the only australian guys who kick it at a high level were Ruleburs, which was acquired by Haley Ltd. recently this year, common knowledge studion ahs a quite nice approach in many ways similar to the ABRD. Of course, the BPM aspects which are core to the ABRD are not present, and this is all that makes the real difference in the ABRD, besides from the model driven approach whch allows to think of any rule execution engine as a potential execution environment for ABRD rules. The guys from ILOG didn't show up because of some time management problems, which is a pity since these guys have a nice tool I think (although very IT oriented) and I had some targeted questions. But I hope I will get to asking them some time if I make it to meeting them at any other venue.

All in all, the workshop on friday was quite nice for me, we got to show what the very recent ABRD does, and also got me to enrich my mind with odeas from the other colleagues who each do a nice job I think. After summer holiday, I will thake some time on my own and rethink what we are curently doing in the business rules management community as a whole and look for interesting directions of practical research and enhancements. One aspect which I already find exciting is on the methodological level and is about some initiative for agile rule modeling which I was introduced to by the VP Methodology of ILOG. I am looking forward to that.

I'll keep you update with any new things that happen in the ARIS business rule management worls and from a more research perspective too.

Marwane El Kharbili

You wanna talk to ramona?

If you want to test how well robots (or artificial intelligence agents if you think about a human robot when hearing the word robot) can have a normal discussion, then you can test it here. Ramona is a virtual person, and here, you can chat with her. I tested her ability to follow a normal conversation with and I have to say she does quite well.

Accoring to KuzweilAI.net (the hosts of Ramona), Ramona is the first live virtual performing and recording artist. You can learn more about her here.

I noticed that the discussion flows a lot better if you just answer her questions at the start till she has enough information about you. It's astonishing to see how much progress artificial intelligence has made. when are we going to have a pet imitation which is not dirty and to which you can talk (I am ironic of course)? Imagine virtual medical assistants which could talk to old people so that they do not feel alone! I can't wait for the future!

Marwane El Kharbili

Ruleburst, Haley, and the business rules market

After having acquired US Business Rules vendors Haley (See this official Press release from the 14th of November 2007), Ruleburst have rebranded as Haley Limited (See corresponding Press release of the 10th of March 2008). Haley is a recognized business rules vendor in the united states. This confirms the strategic importance of growth in the US market by the Australian natural language business rules specialist.

Haley's flagship products (2 among several products by Haley) have both rebranded:

• Ruleburst Studio (a natural language based business rules management system that integrates with the office suite) as Haley Office Rules.
• HaleyAuthority (collaborative capture and management of business rules) rebrands as Haley Expert Rules.

Ruleburst now Haley has several partnerships with industrial partners such as Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft and Lagan. They are also research partner of the e-Government Lab of the Fraunhofer Fokus Institute (Institut für Offene Konnunikationssystems, Berlin) in Germany.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Drools - Business Rules the JBOSS way

I have been hearing about drools for quite time now, at least since 2 years. At the JBOSS JBOSSWorld conference in the US in mid-february in Orlando. Drools is the business rule management system (BRMS) from JBOSS. The contained rules engine is an implementation of the RETE algortihm. I am curious to know what their approach to business rules is. This is why I got started a little bit with the documentation to understand their user interaction strategy.

All I know is that Drools is rather destined to outsource business rules from java code. This is a pretty targeted use of business rules. But this makes sense since drools works on J2EE application servers (rules can be pulled from drools directly into the application). Drools uses the Google Web Toolkit and is free to download under the Apache license. My view on business rules is the following: rules exist on very different layers of the enterprise. Rules are inherently pervasive. for example, business rules can be modeled to describe business decision making patterns for a company routing electricity over a network of cable spanning the whole country. But rules can also be used to contain the parametrization logic of the application implementing this routing, potentially written in a target programing language. so both sets of business rules are needed. business rules have got to be modeled in both cases. The first set of business rules should be destiined to contain implementation-independent logic, and can capture rules on a business lelel. This is why I call these business rules. the other set of rules are implementation specific, and are destined to be modeled and integrated by the programmer, This is why i think they should be simply called rules. Now I am curious about what the components of drools are and what it would allow to do.

I am going to write some future posts about that as I will be discovering more about that. Hopefully some interesting ideas will come out of that.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business rules, COBOL and Mainframes

Ilog have announced their new Cobol Add-On for Jrules, on the 19.02.2008. I read 2 posts about this here and here too. It should simplify SOA governance for legacy systems. It is destined to be used with legacy systems and in particular mainframe systems upon which applications are coded in COBOL. No need to say that finding programmers which still have much experience in COBOL is no easy task, and maintaining these applications is getting harder. But for companies that have invested much in these mainframe systems, the question of leaving these systems behind doesn't even pose itself. using the COBOL add-on for JRules is a way of outsourcing the business Rules embedded in theses mainframes to manage them. This also allows an SOA integration of these systems by invoking COBOL code through the business rules. COBOL code can also be generated from business rules. So quite an interesting application of business rules to legacy systems. I had heard a webcast by the guys from Corticon about how to realize such a legacy modernization and they were tackling the same topic. So it looks like business rules management system providers see this field of legacy systems as a very important one to their expansion strategy.

Marwane El Kharbili.

SOA and semantic data integration

I found an interesting post about the role of semantic data integration in SOA by Ken Rugg. The author's main argument is that an efficient system governance implies an efficient SOA governance. And that this SOA governance can only be achieved if the data that is processed by an SOA architecture has the same meaning everywhere and for everybody. The way the author sees semantics is in the form of a Common Informational Model, not in the sense of reasoning-enabling ontologies. This reminded me of the CIM models by the DMTF, for IT system management, as part of their Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) activities. The efforts driven by the DMTF also seek to enable efficient distributed systems governance. Nothing exceptional up until now, apart from the fact that semantic data integration is not easy at all in highly dynamic systems, such as it would be the case once web service compositions will become a reality. No, the most interesting is Progress Data Xtend. Their approach to the question of enabling semantic data integration is using rules. However these rules must have access to all the data exchanges which from my point of view is not possible unless you use a service bus for managing and executing services, because it is a closed system, and controls all data exchanges running upon it. While many people think that SOA can only be implemented through a service bus, this is not true. SOA says nothing about its implementation, and SOA doesn't even tell you that you need web services. One can imagine open systems able to dynamically generate composition of their services, and a new choreography for all their services, once they have discovered a new service. Nevertheless, the idea would make sense if you use one single platform like JBPM from JBOSS to execute your services and are ready to integrate the Data Xtend platform to the rest of the SOA architecture. An interesting approach in all cases.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business Rules and the semantic Web

So when will the wedding take place? This seems to be the question everybody is asking about Business Rule Management (BRM) and the Semantic Web (SW). At least the buys from the European Business Rules Conference did (http://www.semantic-web-days.net/EBRC_start.htm). Last year they organized the Semantic Web Days at the EBRC 2007. It took the form of a tutorial by Gerd Wagner (University of Cottbus and REWERSE Project) and colleagues and an exhibition by innovative companies and research institutes to present the latest innovations. In the tutorial, Gerd Wagner talked about Rule Modeling and Rule Interchange between different representation formalisms. He also talked about the latter in the context of the approaches of the REWERSE European research project and the W3C RIF (Rule Interchange Format) working group of the W3C. Another project dealing with the question is the MUSING project, under coordination of our neighbors here in Saarbrücken, the DFKI, represented by the person of Thierry Declerck.

This is only one of many events tackling the question of bringing specialists of the two domains together, since they are working mainly on inherently adjacent issues. One of the characteristics of research on business rules is the variety of works from very different people with different backgrounds. Due to lack of communication and exchange, we undergo the risk of having to reinvent the wheel at each time. One will inevitably notice this if one works in the Business Rules domain and tries to get an overview and an incept of what is really going on in research about business rules.

There is no need to be an oracle to see how semantic web technologies can help business rule propagation, interchange and enforcement in systems all over the web (actually there is no reason why the same approaches could be used for most type of distributed environments and systems), but also what level of artificial intelligence awareness the use of business rules in the semantic web architecture and applications would bring. I only hope that after the REWERSE project is over, many researchers will get to know the results, take profit from the dissemination efforts of REWERSE and build on them, and that through the variety of backgrounds, positions and ideas, that we will bring Business Rule Management to the next level, being really productive in a semantic distributed environment.

Marwane El Kharbili

My selection from the European Business Rules Conference 2008

I had promised to write an entry specifically to list my selection of talks at the 7th european business rules conference this year (June 16-18 2008). So let's get to the point here, I made a list of the most interesting talks from my point of view:

1. Benefits of a BR Management Tool / Repository and not a Requirement Management Tool by Shikha Khan(Application Project Manager, Rules Management)
2. Interaction between datamodels, rules and processes by Ralph Nijpels (KLM)
3. BRM without a rule engine by Petr Chotebovsky (Microsoft )
4. About the nature of Business Rules - Some basic answers from the perspective of Enterprise Ontology by Jan Dietz (TU Delft, The Netherlands)
5. Verification and Validation by Silvie Spreeuwenberg (LibRT)
6. Natural Language Parser for Business Rule Management by Rob van Haarst (Ness)
7. A Comprehensive Architecture for Business Rules by Mukundan Agaram (Senior Designer and Architect, Delta Dental)
8. Business Motivation Model by John Hall (Principal Model Systems Ltd.)

Now if you have a look at the line-up for this time, you would not want to miss this year's conference. My personal absolute favorites are numbers 2,4 and 6. Of course it is hard to choose because it really is all about what you already know and you are interested in at the moment for your organization.

Now there is still something about the tutorials to say here, I have made a pre-selection here, again solely based on the titles:

1. SBVR, business models and vocabulary by Sjir Nijssen and Donald Chapin.
2. Business Rules Standards in Practice by Markus Schacher, KnowGravity.

Many people don't know about standards in the Business Rule Management field, because there is not a lot of them, because they are very recent and because they are not yet set productively. Now my point is that such tutorials as those I have listed are really what we need to communicate about these standards, what business questions and needs they answe and how to use them.

Notice that the list of talks and tutorials is not yet complete so it might very well be worth another look in the next couple of months. I'll write another entry short before the conference anyways. Hope you'll make it in this year's edition!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business Rule Management and Processes

I have noticed the increase in amount of talks and webcasts on the net treating and evangelizing the alliance of Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) and Business Process Management. I have heard some when I had time to, because I work on the topic and I am passionated by the possibilities that BRMS allow for. I am not going to list all the reasons why avery BPM project, design and requirement gathering method, as well as implementation should have Business Rules as one of its core components or concerns.

I want to put attention on two talks:

1. The first one has been held at gartner's Business Process Managemebt summit in Las Vegas this year (4-7 february 2008). Marc Kerremans gived a talk entitled "Business Rule Management: State of the Art" where he gave an introduction to BRM and tackled the question: "What added value does BRM bring to BPM?"
2. The talks that are to be held at the Business Rules Conference, this year from June 16-18 at the Marriott Hotel, Munich, Gemany. A key note presentation is to be given by Ronald G. Ross at the opening. The talk by Ralph Nijpels (KLM): "Interaction between
   datamodels, rules and processes", by Prof. Stef Joosten (CS dept. Open University): "Can business rules make process models obsolete?" and the talk by Jan Dietz (TU Delft, Netherlands): "About the nature of Business Rules - Some basic answers from the Perspective of Enterprise Ontology" are the ones that immediately caught my eye. The first two tackle the question of how to bring BR and BPM and the thirs one askes questions about semantics and Business Rules.

This was just a small entry to signal the fact that many talks are held to make the case for Business Rules and Business Rules and Business Process Management in particular. I foresee even more of these and related industrial conferences as the matter gets atention from the industry. As for the Business Rules Conference in June I will write a dedicated entry to tell about the talks that seem most interesting to me (at least from the name of them).

Marwane El Kharbili.