As surely as Business Rules Forum follows RulesFest, so RuleML follows Business Rules Forum. This is the “academic” rules conference, which boasted a good selection of CEP-related papers this year covering some interesting topics. My (first) session here was a keynote covering “Experiences in CEP” - a slightly different slant on the session presented at RulesFest. Today we explored more the different roles and rule types used in 2 rule-driven TIBCO event processing technologies:

• TIBCO Hawk: event filtering for alarm detection: ECA rules providing “reflex” behaviors for systems
• TIBCO BusinessEvents: full event / event stream processing including Rete-based inferencing / event pattern processing

We’ll do a comparison in a future post. But the general message for the RuleML community was one of encouragement: the use of rules / rules technology / event-driven rules is succeeding, and growing, in industry.

With the end of the BBC conference, the hotel has returned to its normal industry-specific event schedule. By the pool an open area has been turned into an outdoor wedding chapel.  Downstairs there is some kind of gynaecology conference being set up - complete with a curtained off booth that looks like it might actually be a “demo area”… no, surely not?

It’s that time of year again - next week is the RulesFest conference (W coast USA), followed by the Business Rules Forum conference and RuleML workshop (co-hosted on the E coast USA). From a CEP perspective we have:

• RulesFest: a good selection of sessions on CEP-related matters, such as:
  • EBay’s Kenny Shi on a real-time decision platform and decisions as asssets.
  • IBM’s Daniel Selman on situations, decisions and processes, and probably giving an update on IBM’s efforts to merge their Business Events and Business Rules architectures.
  • Mauricio Salatino of Plug Tree (a Drools consultancy) is talking about rules, processes and CEP based on an emergency services demo.
  • Event Driven Rules and Experiences in CEP courtesy of TIBCO
  • Nate Derbinsky from the University of Michigan on scaling of memory for “Reactive Rule-based Agents” using SOAR.
• Business Rules Forum: this is part of the analyst-focused Building Business Capability conference that seemed wildly popular last year.
  • Nathan Bell of Pharmacy OneSource has built his own version of  a “massively parallel expert system” using Drools and Gigaspaces.
  • Paul Haley of Automata is presenting on the Semantics of Events.
  • TIBCO is presenting on what analysts need to know about business events…
  • I see also that EBay’s Kenny Shi is presenting here too, albeit on the economics of decisioning rather than real-time decisions.
• RuleML: this is the more technical part of the week versus BR Forum:
  • A keynote on Event-driven Rules: Experiences in CEP (from TIBCO)
  • Standards for Complex Event Processing and Reaction Rules by Adrian Paschke, Paul Vincent, Florian Springer, based on the Dagstuhl work
  • Supporting Data Consistency in Concurrent Process Execution with Assurance Points and Invariant Rules by Susan Urban, Andrew Courter, Le Gao and Mary Shuman
  • Probabilistic Event Calculus based on Markov Logic Networks by Anastasios Skarlatidis, Georgios Paliouras, George Vouros and Alexander Artikis
  • On Applying Temporal Database Concepts to Event Queries by Foruhar Ali Shiva and Susan Urban
  • Event Condition Expectation (ECE) Rules for Monitoring Observable Systems by Stefano Bragaglia, Federico Chesani, Paola Mello, Marco Montali, Davide Sottara and Emory Fry.

TIBCO is also sponsoring the BBC / Business Rules Forum event, and indeed TIBCO’s Nimbus CEO Ian Gotts is also presenting here. Looks like a busy 2 weeks - please look me up if you are attending any of these events!

Thanks to Prof Adrian Paschke for pointing out the RuleML2011 Symposium agenda is now posted. RuleML is both an academic research program (in particular supporting rule standards like W3C RIF) and host for rule research conferences such as this. The symposium covers a range of research topics from semantic web to CEP: CEP-related papers this year include:

• On Complex Event Processing for real-time situational awareness
• Retractable Complex Event Processing and Stream Reasoning
• Entity-Based State Management for Complex Event Processing Applications
• A Declarative Framework for Matching Iterative and Aggregative Patterns against Event Streams
• Rule-Based Complex Event Processing for Food Safety and Public Health

RuleML is being hosted with IJCAI - the AI conference - which itself has the odd CEP-related paper…

• Paradoxical diagnosis of complex discrete-event systems
• Fast Anomaly Detection for Streaming Data
• Activity Recognition with Finite State Machines
• Extracting temporal patterns from interval-based sequences
• Gaussianity Measures for Detecting the Direction of Causal Time Series
• Positive Unlabeled Learning for Time Series Classification
• Unsupervised Learning of Patterns in Data Streams using Compression and Edit Distance
• Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering Over Time
• Integrating Learning into a BDI Agent for Environments with Changing Dynamics
• Cross-People Motion Activity Recognition
• A logic for causal inference in time series with discrete and continuous variables
• Strategy Learning for Autonomous Agents in Smart Grid Markets
• A Hidden Markov Model variant for sequence classification
• Learning Decision Rules from Data Streams
• Constraint Programming on Infinite Data Streams
• Continuous Time Planning for Multiagent Teams with Temporal Constraints
• Classification of Emerging Extreme Event Tracks in Multi-Variate Spatio-Temporal Physical Systems Using Dynamic Network Structures: Application to Hurricane Track Prediction (also winner of the longest title award!)

Some of these look pretty interesting (although remember this is a research conference). Event is on from July 16-22 in beautiful Barcelona (Spain).

Rules - both business rules definitions (including business decisions) and rule-based programming - are very relevant to event processing (both for complex event detection and the subsequence decision and reaction - all parts of the “processing” aspect).  Over the coming weeks there are some interesting conference events coming up:

EPTS5, 21-23 Sept 09: the Event Processing Technical Society is covering its working group activities in Trento Italy.

• Audience: analysts, vendors, corporate architects interested in the state of play in event processing technologies.
• Interesting for CEP: lots of European research is going on in CEP, and quite a lot of commercial take-up too. Some of the US leaders in EPTS won’t be crossing the Big Pond for this meeting though. Is this a sign that Europe is at parity with the US on advanced IT?
• Website: http://events.unitn.it/en/eps09

BRForum, 1-5 Nov 09: the main Business Rules conference (interpreted as either “business rules” conference or “business” rules conference - both views are valid!). Co-located (hoorah!) with
RuleML09, 5-7 Nov 09: rule markups and related issues, covering SBVR, PRR, RIF and (possibly) RuleML itself.

• Audience: BRForum is for IT and business folks interested in the rules area (including rule documentation as well as decision automation). Although the content mostly aims outside the power of events / EDA / CEP world.
  The RuleML audience is more for the technical folks (systems integrators, enterprise architects, standards folks, academics) looking at rule representations.
• Interest for CEP: At BRForum David Luckham is giving a (wakeup) session. TIBCO is also presenting on how CEP helps Decisions. RuleML probably has a CEP session including a CEP keynote on Rules in CEP. Also interesting is the start of coverage of other rule types - in particular constraint rules - which have yet to be much exploited in CEP (or conventional decision services).
• Website: http://www.businessrulesforum.com/ (and TIBCO blog readers can apply a discount code “9SPPV”)
  and http://www.defeasible.org/ruleml2009/

ORF09, 26-30 Oct 09: the October Rules Fest is an “alternative” to BRForum for “rules programmers”.

• Audience: those interested in rule programming constructs, techniques, issues, etc.
• Interest for CEP: Even more CEP focus here; one emailed comment was that “CEP is the linch-pin for all rulebased systems for the future”. Plus a TIBCO contribution on whats different about rules in CEP…
• Website: http://www.octoberrulesfest.org/