The last day of RulesFest covered a couple more interesting topics, such as:

• Mark Proctor on “Goal Oriented Programing”: this is interesting because it follows the TIBCO experiences with goals and plans driving complex dynamic business processes using tools like Active Fulfillment. Furthermore, these ideas are finding some concrete specifications in things like the OMG Case Management work (driving cases through case plans).
  [See also here].
• Alan Moore on “Deploying Knowledge Based Technologies In Embedded Systems” was one session I unfortunately missed due to a meeting; however it certain is very topical too with agent-based monitoring systems like TIBCO Hawk also being very suitable for the real-time control area (and indeed there was a paper at DEBS this year on a similar topic).
  [See also here].
• Andrew Ng covered “Machine Learning” via data - which is a fascinating topic and also one we are seeing in TIBCO with the integration of TIBCO Patterns (aka Netrics) in CEP tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents (and even in system monitoring rule engines  like TIBCO Hawk).
  [Also covered here].

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!

Some more interesting sessions at RulesFest…

1. Hal Hildebrand from Salesforce.com presented on “building a distributed rule engine”, adding JESS onto Oracle Coherence. Hal found that other (presumably research) distributed rule engines had reinvented their own “distributed systems” whereas he re-used an existing one (the Tangosol nee Oracle Coherance infrastructure). Amongst other improvements, Hal wants to translate state diagrams into rules in a future version; the system isn’t yet used in production though. [Disclosure: TIBCO BusinessEvents 2.X-4.X also runs as a distributed rule engine under an extended Coherance infrastructure, and also has built-in UML State Model support].
2. Jerome Boyer from IBM presented on his agile rule development methodology (ABRDM), an open source Eclipse-based methodology tool being extended to support (BPM) process development and possibly (in future) CEP. This would have been an excellent discussion for the 2010 EPTS Symposium!
3. Edson Tirelli from JBoss presented a useful “Introduction to CEP”, containing an as yet unpublished version of the CEP Market diagram… [Reminder to self - will post this up on the blog in a few weeks or on request].
4. Andrew Waterman presented on “Capturing Social Rules”, and his use of the OMG PRR rule modelling standard. Good to see this standard being exercised…
5. The end-session panel included a question on whether / when TIBCO BusinessEvents (and other rule engines) will support the full enterprise hardware ecosystem such as smartphones. Another interesting question was on the relevance and importance of intelligent agents in rule automation.

Good to be hearing about a wide variety of topics here at RulesFest this week.

• Continuing a trend of TIBCO customers presenting here, TIBCO CEP user Union Pacific’s George Williamson presented views on Design Decisions for Rules Based Applications. Last year it was a talk on South West Airlines. I’m taking bets on who might be presenting next year…
• Some of the rule-based research systems have been presented, like John Laird’s SOAR (where the engine manipulates rule-specified operators, rather than selecting rules to execute), and SRI’s Karen Myers talked about Battlefield Situation Awareness with a “learning by demonstration” system.
• James Taylor reminded us of the importance of “decisions” viz rules, which conveniently followed and fitted-in with my CEP talk’s breakdown of IT into events-decisions-actions. I’ll follow James’ lead and post some more notes on my presentation later.

Bloggers of the event are being pretty frank which is nice to see - see Carole Ann Matignon and Carlos Serrano-Morales, James Owen, and Daniel Selman.

Disclosure: JT, CAM, CSM, and JO mentioned above are ex-colleagues from prior lives. Either its a small world or I’m stuck in a small orbit!

Time to synchronise diaries for the Fall convention and conference schedule… starting, in date order, with:

RulesFest, 11-14 Oct, San Jose CA

This covers the declarative rule-programming paradigm, as relevant to CEP as it is to conventional data processing, as exemplified by some of the more advanced CEP engines use of rule-based paradigms:

• Constraint specialist (and OpenRules chief) Jacob Feldman is talking about a CEP domain - “connecting the dots” - what we might call situation awareness. TIBCO watchers will note his keywords in the abstract: “always running”, “inference engine”, “pub sub”, “rules engine”, “finite state machine”, “multiple event channels”, … and “Excel” (!)  - with the latter being Jacob’s favorite “business user interface”.
• Oracle’s Hal Hildebrand is talking about a Distributed Rules Engine - in this case based on JESS (which may or may not mean Oracle’s version of said stalward Java Expert System Shell - if I recall the original abbreviation correctly). This might compare with TIBCO SPM as “an autonomic system for managing, monitoring and provisioning a large scale distributed system”.
• Starview’s Mack Mackenzie is talking about edBPM - “rule-based event processing systems and workflow business process management systems” with the comment that “unifying them can enable powerful next-generation use cases like real-time datamining and emergent pattern detection”.
• “Software Practices and Experiences of Rules in CEP Applications” by some old geezer might also be relevant…

Last year the event was “ORF” - and this year RulesFest again looks good value from $349 for software and system architects and designers, and should provide a more technical flavor compared to the more business-focused BRForum which we will preview next…