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!