News Release: World Wide Web Consortium Holds Rule Language Workshop

Today's W3C workshop marks the first steps W3C is taking into the area 
of Rule Languages. Over 60 industry and research leaders, including 
Boeing, FannieMae, FreddieMac, Fujitsu, IBM, ILOG, Oracle, and SAIC will 
be presenting. For more information, please contact Janet Daly, +1 617 
253 5884 <janet@w3.org>.

World Wide Web Consortium Holds Rule Languages Workshop

First Gathering of Industry Leaders in Business Rules and Semantic Web
applications

Web Resources:

This Press Release
   In English: http://www.w3.org/2005/04/swrules-pressrelease.html.en
   In French: http://www.w3.org/2005/04/swrules-pressrelease.html.fr

W3C Rule Languages Workshop: http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/

http://www.w3.org/ -- 27 April 2005 - W3C has brought together over
sixty industry and research organizations in a Washington, DC workshop
geared at the development of a uniform Rule language - the next layer in
the Semantic Web development stack. Hosted by ILOG, SA and supported by
DARPA, the W3C Rule Languages Workshop is bringing together the leaders
in Business Rules development, customers, and Semantic Web developers in
an effort to identify requirements for a common rule language.

"After years of industry and research work in rules languages, we're
approaching convergence," explained Sandro Hawke, W3C Semantic Web Team
developer and workshop co-chair. "The combination of user companies,
rule language designers and semantic web developers coming together at
this workshop allows each constituency to contribute to a shared
solution for Rule languages on the Web."

Hawke shares workshop co-chairing duties with Christian de Sainte Marie
of ILOG and Said Tabet of RuleML.org.

Rule Technologies Are Key to Successful Software Applications

Rules are everywhere. They are found in many domains, disciplines, and
industries. Business policies, laws and regulations, guidelines and best
practices, definitions and axioms, database schema translations,
workflow branching and technical constraints, all require a declarative
and modular approach to their implementation.

There is a thriving commercial market in several families of rule
technologies, including production rules, event-condition-action rules,
Prolog, relational database systems, and others. However, practical
interoperability between these systems, especially across the different
families, is currently quite limited.

Web Applications Need a Standard Rule Language

Rules are also a key element of the Semantic Web vision, allowing
integration, derivation, and transformation of data from multiple
sources in a distributed, transparent, and scalable manner. Rules can
themselves be treated as data, published on the web, and when URIs (or
QNames) are used as symbol-constants in a rule language, they can form
useful links between knowledge bases. In a Web services environment,
rules offer the opportunity to enable the automation of the enforcement
and composition of policies governing the delivery of information, the
access to services, or the execution of processes.

This workshop is a step along the path to establishing a standard
language framework to support rule system interoperability on the Web.
It aims at gathering vendors, technologists, application developers and
users to discuss and provide recommendations to the W3C regarding what
is the best approach to the specification of a standard or family of
standards for the public representation and exchange of rules on the
Web, in terms of avoiding redundant efforts, of optimizing the potential
for wide adoption, and of promoting consistency and interoperability
between different applications or layers, while preserving their
specific requirements.

Diverse Participants include Leaders in Software, Manufacturing and
Financial Industries, Life Sciences Researchers, Semantic Web Engineers

Sixty-eight papers have been accepted to the workshop in response to the
Call for Participation. The accepted papers can be loosely grouped into
three categories: use cases from various industries, candidate
technologies, and Rule Language-Semantic Web convergence. The program
includes sessions that address these topics, and to evaluating the range
of rule languages currently in use, to determine if they share any
common traits, and consider next steps.

The workshop is expected to result in the following deliverables:

     * Use Cases (ideally with Test Cases) and Potential Requirements
     * Candidate Technologies
     * Workshop position papers
     * Workshop presentations
     * Workshop minutes
     * Recommendations regarding future work

Many of these are already published on the workshop home page. Future
directions may include the creation of a W3C Working Group to focus on
Rule Languages.

Contact America, Australia --
     Janet Daly, <janet@w3.org>, +1.617.253.5884 or +1.617.253.2613
Contact Europe, Africa, and the Middle East --
     Marie-Claire Forgue, <mcf@w3.org>, +33.492.38.75.94
Contact Asia --
     Yasuyuki Hirakawa <chibao@w3.org>, +81.466.49.1170

About the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C]

The W3C was created to lead the Web to its full potential by developing
common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its
interoperability. It is an international industry consortium jointly run
by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT
CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and
Mathematics (ERCIM) headquartered in France and Keio University in
Japan. Services provided by the Consortium include: a repository of
information about the World Wide Web for developers and users, and
various prototype and sample applications to demonstrate use of new
technology. To date, over 350 organizations are Members of the
Consortium. For more information see http://www.w3.org/

Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2005 14:28:00 UTC