Application Development Trends and Rules

Nice article in Application Development Trends on business rules - New Business Rules to Live By written by Linda Briggs. Some nice examples, good quotes from John Rymer from Forrester and a pretty good summary.

Comments

[Chad N]

I am not sure if you have heard anything about semantic web development and some potential BI applications. I have heard some discussion as to the ability that semantic offers as a rules engine that can learn and adapt in a continually changing environment. Do you have any light to shed on this? If so, is that how information builders accomplished the search interface for their Google BI search box, Webfocus (http://www.informationbuilders.com/products/webfocus/).

[James Taylor]

Chad
Thanks for the comment. Firstly, can you talk some more about the Information Builders app - I don’t see that it is a semantic web app.
Anyway, most semantic web applications today are about low-level, web-based data integration and queries using information decomposed to the Resource Description Framework (RDF). I think RDF has got a future in search and data mining applications but Business Rules, and Enterprise Decision Management are really about enterprise behavior not about enterprise information. EDM applications might be consumers of RDF/Semantic Web information and applications for manipulating this kind of information might embed a rules engine but I think they are fairly independent decisions unless I am missing something.
JT
Thanks to Paul Vincent for some color on RDF

[Dan Brickley]

Hi there!

This point is exactly what's on my mind right now: """EDM applications might be consumers of RDF/Semantic Web information and applications for manipulating this kind of information might embed a rules engine"""

I'm working with an app that merges data across multiple environments. We're reflecting it into RDF/OWL for this. But we are also exploring some scenarios where that data flows into Blaze Advisor. My current preliminary understanding of BA is that to do this, we'd have to interface with BA via either a Java class or XML schema domain model.

Are there any moves in place to teach BA how to consume RDF data more directly? I'm very familiar with RDF but am completely new to BA as of last week. I notice you've got some involvement in the W3C RIF group. If you've any interest in collaboration w.r.t. wiring up RDF to Blaze Advisor, I'd be happy to discuss some details...