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RuleBurst re-brands as Haley Limited

For those who are interested in my former company, they are still committed to natural language business rules management technology, as shown in their most recent press release.  They have also picked up on the public sector activity, especially eligibility, as discussed here. 

From the release, CEO, Dominic O’Hanlon, said:

  • “With our natural language rule authoring capabilities and BRMS solutions, we are uniquely positioned to make our customers more competitive and agile in a fast-paced, highly-regulated world.”
  • “For the government market, Haley is a worldwide leader in using natural language technology to rapidly transform regulations, policies and rules into automated decision-making systems, to determine eligibility for government services, and in the taxation and immigration arenas.”

As discussed here, this focuses comes from Continue reading “RuleBurst re-brands as Haley Limited”

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In the names of CEP and BPM

Have you heard the one about how to drive BPM people crazy? 

Ask them the question that drives CEP people crazy!

Last fall, at the RuleML conference in Orlando, was the first time I heard a consensus that a standard ontology of events and processes was sorely needed.  I’ve had a number of discussions with others on this over the interim until today’s posts by Paul Vincent, summing up an OMG meeting in Washington, DC, and Sandy Kelmsley’s comments on a survey of 590 business process modeling notation users.   Continue reading “In the names of CEP and BPM”

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Over $100m in 12 months backs natural language for the semantic web

Radar Networks is accelerating down the path towards the world’s largest body of knowledge about what people care about using Twine to organize their bookmarks.  Unlike social bookmarking sites, Twine uses natural language processing technology to read and categorize people’s bookmarks in a substantial ontology.  Using this ontology, Twine not only organizes their bookmarks intelligently but also facilitates social networking and collaborative filtering that result in more relevant suggestions of others’ bookmarks than other social bookmarking sites can provide.

Twine should rapidly eclipse social bookmarking sites, like Digg and Redditt.  This is no small feat!

The underlying capabilities of Twine present Radar Networks with many other opportunities, too.  Twine could spider out from bookmarks and become a general competitor to Google, as Powerset hopes to become.  Twine could become the semantic web’s Wikipedia, to which Metaweb’s Freebase aspires. Continue reading “Over $100m in 12 months backs natural language for the semantic web”

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Goals and backward chaining using the Rete Algorithm

I was prompted to post this by request from Mark Proctor and Peter Lin and in response to recent comments on CEP and backward chaining on Paul Vincent’s blog (with an interesting perspective here).

I hope those interested in artificial intelligence enjoy the following paper .  I wrote it while Chief Scientist of Inference Corporation.  It was published in the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence over twenty years ago. 

The bottom line remains:

  1. intelligence requires logical inference and, more specifically, deduction
  2. deduction is not practical without a means of subgoaling and backward chaining
  3. subgoaling using additional rules to assert goals or other explicit approaches is impractical
  4. backward chaining using a data-driven rules engine requires automatic generation of declarative goals

We implemented this in Inference Corporation’s Automated Reasoning Tool (ART) in 1984.  And we implemented it again at Haley a long time ago in a rules langauge we called “Eclipse” years before Java.

Regretably, to the best of my knowledge, ART is no longer available from Inference spin-off Brightware or its further spin-off, Mindbox.  To the best of my knowledge, no other business rules engine or Rete Algorithm automatically subgoals,  including CLIPS, JESS, TIBCO Business Events (see above), Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor, and Ilog Rules/JRules.  After reading the paper, you may understand that the resulting lack of robust logical reasoning capabilities is one of the reasons that business rules has not matured to a robust knowledge management capability, as discussed elsewhere in this blog.  Continue reading “Goals and backward chaining using the Rete Algorithm”

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Behind the CEP curtain – it’s about time, not the cache

TIBCO is the CEP vendor most focused on the market for business rules, as reflected in Paul Vincent’s post here.  Although I agree with Paul that rule vendors are not currently offering enough in terms of support for long-running processes, the conclusions that he draws in favor of considering a CEP alternative to a BRMS are not compelling yet.

Paul said that rules don’t address the following that are addressed by CEP:

  1. BAM (business activity monitoring) and the other BPM (business performance management)
  2. Complex-rule processing
  3. Customer-centric (portfolio-based) decisions / policies

I am sure Paul was just being flippant, but you may notice that there is a bit of a war going on between CEP, BPM and rules right now.  Continue reading “Behind the CEP curtain – it’s about time, not the cache”

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Externalization of rules and SOA is important – for now

James Taylor’s notes on his lunch with Sandy Carter of IBM and the CEO of Ilog prompted me to write this.  Part of the conversation concerned the appeal of SOA and rules to business users.  Speaking as a former vendor, we all want business people to appreciate our technology.  We earn more if they do.  They say to IT “we want SOA” or “we want rules” and our sale not only becomes easier, it becomes more valuable.  So we try to convince the business that they are service-oriented, so they should use SOA.  Or we tell the business that they have (and make) rules, so they should use (and manage their own) rules.   And rules advocates embrace and enhance the SOA value proposition saying that combined, you get the best of both worlds.  This is almost precisely the decision management appeal.  Externalize your decisions as services and externalize rules from those services for increased agility in decision making.   This is an accurate and appropriate perspective for point decision making.  But it doesn’t cover the bigger picture that strategic business people consider, which includes governance and compliance. 

Nonetheless,

Effective SOA and business rules have one requirement (or benefit) in common: externalization.  

The externalization of services from applications Continue reading “Externalization of rules and SOA is important – for now”

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Oracle should teach Siebel CRM about location and money

Not long ago I posted on the need to understand common concepts well. My example then concerned the need to understand time well enough to answer a question like, “How much did IBM’s earnings increase last quarter?”. Recently, in contemplating some training issues related to the integration of Haley Authority within Siebel, I came across examples phrasings from the documentation on Siebel’s web site, including:

  • if an account’s location contains “CA” then add 50000 in “USD” for the account
  • if an account’s location contains “CA” then add 70000 in “USD” on today for the account

Two things are immediately obvious.

  1. Oracle does not understand location.
  2. Oracle has an interesting, but nonetheless poor understanding of money.

Of course, I am intimately familiar with Authority’s understanding of money. However, Siebel needs more than Authority understands. Continue reading “Oracle should teach Siebel CRM about location and money”

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CEP crossing the chasm into BPM by way of BRMS

Complex event processing (CEP) software handles many low-level events to recognize a high-level event that triggers a business process.  Since many business processes do not consider low-level data events, BPM may not seem to need event processing.  On the other hand, event processing would not be relevant at all if it did not occasionally trigger a business process or decision.  In other words, it appears that:

  • CEP requires BPM but
  • BPM does not require CEP

The first point is market limiting for CEP vendors.  Fortunately for CEP vendors, however, most BPM does require event-processing, however complex.  In fact, event processing is perhaps the greatest weakness of current BPM systems (BPMS) and business rules management systems (BRMS), as discussed further below. Continue reading “CEP crossing the chasm into BPM by way of BRMS”

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Agile Business Rules Management Requires Methodology

Don’t miss the great post about his and Ilog’s take on rule and decision management methodologies by James Taylor today (available here). 

Here’s the bottom line:

  1. Focus on what the system does or decides.
    • Focus on the actions taken during a business process and the decisions that govern them and the deductions that they rely on.
    • In priority order, focus on actions, then decisions, then deductions.
  2. Don’t expect to automate every nuance of an evolving business process on day one – iterate.
    • Iteratively elaborate and refine the conditions and exceptions under which
      • actions show be taken,
      • decisions are appropriate, and
      • deductions hold true

Another way of summing this up is:

Try not to use the word “then” in your rules!

Do check out the Ilog methodology as well as the one I developed for Haley that is available here.  The key thing Continue reading “Agile Business Rules Management Requires Methodology”

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Rules are not enough. Knowledge is core to reuse.

James Taylor’s blog today on rules being core to BPM and SOA in which he discussed reuse had a particularly strong impact on me following a trip yesterday.  During a meeting with the insurance and retail banking practice leaders at a large consulting firm, we looked for synnergies between applications related to investment and applications related to risk.  Of course, during that conversation, we discussed whether operational rules could be usefully shared across these currently siloed areas, but we landed up discussing what they had in common in terms of business concepts, definitions, and fundamental truths or enterprise wide governance.  It was clear to us that this was the most fruitful area to develop core, reusable knowledge assets.

In his post, James agrees with the Butler Group’s statement:

Possibly the most important aspect of a rules repository, certainly in respect of the stated promise of BPM, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and BRMS, is the ability for the developer to re-use rules within multiple process deployments.

I have several problems with this statement: Continue reading “Rules are not enough. Knowledge is core to reuse.”