RuleML Workshop

              International Workshop on
        Rule Markup Languages for Business Rules 
                 in the Semantic Web
            14 June 2002, Sardinia (Italy)

               in conjunction with the 
   First International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002) 
                   and hosted by 
  SIG2 (languages and standards) of the OntoWeb Network


See http://tmitwww.tm.tue.nl/staff/gwagner/RuleML-BR-SW.html

Workshop Description:

The workshop will focus on how rule markup languages, such as RuleML, 
will contribute to the vision of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web 
offers a research perspective for automating business processes.  Rule 
markup languages, that allow to express business rules as modular, 
stand-alone units in a declarative way, and to publish them and 
exchange them between different systems and tools, will play an 
important role for facilitating business-to-customer (B2C) and 
business-to-business (B2B) interactions over the Web. 

*Derivation rules* can be included in an ontology to define derived 
concepts on top of base concepts. In this way, for instance, derived 
business terms, such as customer categories, may be defined. Whenever 
a rule refers to an incomplete predicate, for which explicit negative 
information has to be represented along with ordinary (positive)
information, a second negation, supplementing negation-as-failure,
is needed (as in the formalism of extended logic programs). Using 
this negation in the head of a rule, one can express conflicting
rules that may defeat each other. Such a language for *defeasible
rules* is useful to represent business rules allowing for exceptions.  
In addition to derivation rules, there is another type of rule which 
allows to specify the reactive and communicative behavior of a 
system or agent: *Reaction rules* -- in other contexts also called 
'event-condition-action (ECA) rules' or 'triggers'. Business rules 
that specify the various steps of a business process can be encoded 
in the form of reaction rules. A general markup language for business 
rules has to accommodate these different types of rules and support 
their interoperation. 


Topics of Interest:

We encourage submissions on all topics related to rule markup 
languages. In particular, we solicit papers on

* reaction rules on the Semantic Web
  - event/action languages 
  - execution models 
* defeasible rules on the Semantic Web
  - defeasible concept definitions in ontologies
  - resolving conflicts in triggered action sets 

Other suggested topics include: 
 
* tools and systems for rules on the Semantic Web
* combining rules and ontologies
* integrating rules and description logics
* multiple language rules (Prolog, SQL, OCL, XML, RDF, etc.)
* future application scenarios based on RDF, ontologies and rules
* RuleML-based applications 
* deployment of rule-based applications on the Web 
* rule-based software agents and the Semantic Web
* connecting rules to legacy knowledge bases
* integrating rule bases and distributed fact bases
* handling lineage and reliability of distributed information
* processing negative information with negation(s) 
* using URIs in rules
* XSL transformations of rules
* <yourTopic ... \>


Submission:

We invite articles of no more than 15 pages length describing original
completed work, work in progress, or interesting problems or use cases. 
Submitted papers will be fully refereed based on the originality and 
significance of the ideas presented as well as on technical aspects.  
Publication of accepted papers in the form of post-workshop proceedings 
is being planned.

Please email your submission by 26-April-2002 in PDF or Postscript 
format to one of the workshop co-chairs.


Important Dates:

Submission deadline:   26 April 2002 
Notification:          17 May 2002
Online version:        24 May 2002
Workshop:              14 June 2002


Workshop Co-Chairs:

Michael Schroeder (msch@soi.city.ac.uk)
City Univ. London, UK
http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~msch/

Gerd Wagner (G.Wagner@tm.tue.nl)
Eindhoven Univ. of Technology, NL
http://www.tm.tue.nl/it/staff/gwagner/


Organizing Committee: 

Harold Boley (DFKI Kaiserslautern, DE)
Steve Ross-Talbot (EnigmaTec Ltd., UK)
Michael Schroeder (City Univ. London, UK)
Said Tabet (Nisus Inc., USA)
Gerd Wagner (Eindhoven Univ. of Technology, NL)


Preliminary Program Committee: 

Grigoris Antoniou (Univ. of Bremen, DE)
François Bry (Ludwig-Maximilians-Univ. München, DE)
Carlos Damásio (Univ. Nova de Lisboa, PT)
Mike Dean (BBN Technologies, USA)
Stefan Decker (Stanford Univ., USA)
Anthony Finkelstein (Univ. College London, UK)
Frank van Harmelen (Free Univ. of Amsterdam, NL)
Ian Horrocks (Univ. of Manchester, UK)
Donald Nute (Univ. of Georgia, USA)
Bruce E. Spencer (Univ. of New Brunswick, CA)
Kostas Stathis (City Univ., London, UK)

Received on Monday, 4 March 2002 15:55:59 UTC