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

>the transition of production systems from academic prototypes to deployed 
>systems has been caused less by software maturity than by young people that >- 
>after learning about rules at the university - saw opportunities in the 
>market and completed the transition, with an open mind.  software maturity 
>has been a consequence.  we can resume this kind of topics in a few years.

Again, this is an interesting hypothesis but without supporting evidence. To the chagrin of the rule vendors there is not much use of commercial rule tools in business or IT departments in academia: probably the "less commercial" JESS and DROOLS are used to some extent. I *rarely* come across IT project staff who learnt a rule based approach / rule language at university, and have *never* had any requests for new rule language features like disjunctive conclusions (which are probably irrelevant for this particular class of rule engines anyway).

Having said that, I'd welcome the opportunity to improve the use of commercial rule engines in academia (although this is off topic).

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: Piero A. Bonatti [mailto:bonatti@na.infn.it] 
Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2006 4:11 PM
To: Vincent, Paul D; Francois Bry; public-rif-wg@w3.org
Cc: public-rif-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: [RIF] [UCR]: What is the RIF (revisited) --> changing vendor rule languages

On Thursday 09 February 2006 16:42, Vincent, Paul D wrote:
>  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.

the transition of production systems from academic prototypes to deployed 
systems has been caused less by software maturity than by young people that - 
after learning about rules at the university - saw opportunities in the 
market and completed the transition, with an open mind.  software maturity 
has been a consequence.  we can resume this kind of topics in a few years.

now it would be more profitable to proceed with more productive issues such 
as: identifying what is necessary to enable automatic translation of rules 
across rule-systems [as advocated by some members], preserving their meaning 
while changing their syntax, possibly moving beyond the intended use of the 
rulebase author (Ann may be interested in drawing conclusions from those 
rules, Bob may want to use them in the opposite direction, for diagnostic 
purposes, etc.).  I believe the exercise does not necessarily require any a 
priori decisions about the syntax - it should be similar for horn clauses, 
disjunctive LP, and so on

piero

Received on Thursday, 9 February 2006 16:29:01 UTC