Rule Taxonomy and rules engines

Francis Ip on the ITRedux blog posted on Taxonomy of Rule. A nice summary in many ways, though we are a long way from managing ontologies in business rules management systems - think that really comes under business modeling.

Business modeling and standards like SBVR are important, as are ontologies. They are not, however, the same as process and business rule implementation. Technologies that allow business rules to be implemented and integrated with Business Process Management systems remain the best way to bring agility to process automation and thus to businesses.

Having watched the CASE tool business boom and bust as too many people became interested in modeling for its own sake rather than as a way to develop better systems, I have to hope that attempts to extend the SBVR/BPMI work will not more the focus too far from rule execution in processes to rule modeling in process models. Businesses need models to develop good systems but it is still their systems that run the business and that must be improved to show an ROI.

Thanks to Gene for pointing this out and to my colleague Paul Vincent for some thoughts on it.