[POSTING] We are currently investigating ways of implementing business rules in a computer system. We would appreciate very much any information on the publications that deal with the issue. At this stage, we are looking mostly for the works that describe actual implementation of business rules methodology in experimental or industrial systems. Most interesting for us are the works that describe a language for expressing business rules along with an algorithm/program that can interpret/use the rules in an operational business environment.
From: Manfred Jeusfeld We have the implementation of a deductive database system that can be used to store and evaluate deductive rules (queries, integrity constraints). Hence, if you represent the trace of the execution of business transactions as data in this database, the deductive rule set can do certain checks. So that's kind of an ex post system answer to your request. Details are at http://conceptbase.cc A more recent work is about the detection of contract violation. A contract contains clauses (rules) about the acceptable/expected behaviour of business partners who execute some joint business process. The contract is mapped to an interrelated network of commitments which have the form ifthen if is true (i.e. a certain situation is true), then a business partner promises that she will guarantee that some pattern of actions will be observable in the future These commitments are used to trace back the violator of a business contract. The algorithms are based on a temporal logic interpretation of the world. See Lai Xu, Manfred A. Jeusfeld: Detecting Violators of Multi-party Contracts. Proceedings CoopIS 2004, LNCS 3290, Springer-Verlag for more details. There is a partial implementation of the algorithms in Prolog. By using deadlines, the algorithms can also detect imminent contract violations.
From: "Rick Mathieu" You may want to check with the JRules people and see if they have case studies. http://www.ilog.com/products/jrules/ http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=31403 JRules Wins Jolt Award! Fierce competition couldn't stop JRules at the 2004 Jolt Awards. Honored for product excellence, JRules 4.5 beat a strong field of entries, including Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Sybase. I use the following articles with my database students: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/000605/metaprise.jhtml?_requestid=1554864 http://www.intelligententerprise.com/000801/webhouse.jhtml?_requestid=1554942
From: "Gil Regev" I guess that you already looked at the BR community and the OMG web sites. If not, the BR web site is: http://www.brcommunity.com/index.php There links to the OMG Business Rules initiative from this site. You need to become a member of the community but it is free. (My Comment: I am familier with the community, but I found no information on the current topic on the site)
From: "Loucopoulos, Pericles" I am sending you a paper that might be of interest to you. This was published last year. Since then we have completed the work and we are in the process of finalising a couple of papers that show systematically how you can go from textual business rules to formal descriptions of rules to information systems architecture definition. This approach is supported by a software tool that we have developed on top of the GME environment. We have applied it on a large hospital information system. The papers will probably be ready by end March so if you are interested please let me know and I will send you early releases of them. GME stands for Generic Modelling Environment and you can find details about it at: http://www.isis.vanderbilt.edu/Projects/gme/ We have developed a business rule editor and mapping algorithms on top of this environment.
From: Vipul Gupta Please look at the following paper: Gupta, V. K., Fisher, D. J. and Murtaza, M. B., 1996 "A Consortium Sponsored Knowledge-based System for Managerial Decision making in Industrial Construction," Interfaces, Vol. 26, No. 6, pp. 9-23
From: Sophie Cockcroft My PhD explored this issue in the GIS context, it was also published in: Cockcroft, S 2004 "The design and implementation of a repository for the management of spatial data integrity constraints" Geoinformatica, 8(1) 49-69
From: "Julian Newman" Try contacting Jean Bacon and Ken Moody at Cambridge, and/or David Eyers who is a postdoc working for them. David is probably the most up-to-speed on implementation. Also search Imperial College website for information on the implementation of the Ponder language: Morris Sloman's list of publications has links to a huge body of Imperial College work in this area. Also search the annual POLICY workshop proceedings (earlier years were published by Springer in LNCS, more recent years by IEEE). You could also try contacting Gail-Joon Ahn at North Carolina and Lalana Kagal and Tim Finin at UMBC.
From: Dave Eyers Also search Imperial College website for information on the implementation of the Ponder language: Morris Sloman's list of. It seems that perhaps Imperial are turning away from Ponder a bit - I heard that they're not supporting their code-base any more. I don't know if there's a big sequel which is going to follow... For business rules, I'd recommend casting your eye over the background section of Alan Abraham's Ph.D. thesis and his various other publications online under: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/opera/publications/ There are lots of corporate solutions for managing business rules, but I'd guess you're either not interested in that angle, or have already investigated it.
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