RE: [RIF] [UCR]: What is the RIF (revisited) --> changing vendor rule languages

There are certainly similarities between the rules market today and the SQL market of the early 80s. This is why the vendors are supporting the OMG PRR and RIF efforts. However, so far there is zero push for additional rule construct support in the rule languages. 

Possibly a better comparison between PRR(/RIF version of PRR) would be to BPEL. 

> Perhaps the reason why the rules
> market is fairly small is because the current commercial rule languages 
> are so pathetically poor and ill-founded.

If this is the case I have not seen any evidence to support it, and would welcome any links to support this hypothesis!

Paul Vincent
Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor --- Business Rule Management
OMG Standards for Business Rules, PRR & BPMI
mobile: +44 (0)781 493 7229 ... office: +44 (0)20 7871 7229 


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Kifer [mailto:kifer@cs.sunysb.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 3:57 PM
To: Vincent, Paul D
Cc: Francois Bry; public-rif-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: [RIF] [UCR]: What is the RIF (revisited) --> changing vendor rule languages 


I remember that SQL people were saying similar things about a bunch of
features in the 80s. And then they included them in SQL:1999 as a result of
customer pressures. For instance, explicit quantifiers and recursion.
Meanwhile, some vendors, facing customer pressure, added some features
without waiting for the standard. For instance, Oracle added recursion way
back. Unfortunately, the people who designed this extension for Oracle had
no foggiest idea about what they were trying to do, and the result was
nothing short of an abomination.

RIF should stay away from this approach.  Perhaps the reason why the rules
market is fairly small is because the current commercial rule languages are
so pathetically poor and ill-founded.


	--michael  


"Vincent, Paul D" <PaulVincent@fairisaac.com> wrote:
> 
> Most vendor rule languages are still in active development. However, it
>  is quite rare to get a rule language change request from a
>  customer. Certainly I have
>  never seen any requests to move for example Blaze Advisor SRL in the
>  direction of some of the concepts described in the RIF threads.
> 
> Of course, a customer needing a particular language feature would select a rule engine having that feature. The fact that 70-80% of the commercial rule engin
> e market is provided by 2 vendors indicates some level of maturity about their rule languages.
> 
> Paul Vincent
> Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor --- Business Rule Management
> OMG Standards for Business Rules, PRR & BPMI
> mobile: +44 (0)781 493 7229 ... office: +44 (0)20 7871 7229 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-rif-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-rif-wg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Francois Bry
> Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 1:57 PM
> To: public-rif-wg@w3.org
> Cc: public-rif-wg@w3.org
> Subject: Re: [RIF] [UCR]: What is the RIF (revisited)
> 
> 
> Dave Reynolds wrote:
> 
> > If we look at the business rules market then we have a number of 
> > mature and successful products. One goal for RIF in that market is to 
> > enable users to move rules between systems, in which case RIF is for 
> > interchange between well-established systems. No vendor will change 
> > their language to move towards some invented RIF language. 
> 
> What about customers? They often make vendors move...
> -- 
> 
> Francois
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 9 February 2006 16:20:23 UTC