The slides for my Business Rules Forum presentation on event semantics and focusing on events in order to simplify process definition and to facilitate more robust governance and compliance are at Event-centric BPM. After the talk I spoke with Jan Verbeek and Gartjan Grijzen of Be Informed and reviewed their software, which is excellent. They [...]
Posts under ‘Formal Logic’
Simple problems with the semantic web
The standard for defining ontologies these days is OWL and Protege. Unfortunately, OWL lacks any notion of exceptions in inheritance or any other notion of defeasibility. So, although you may want to say that birds fly, you’re ontology will be broken (or become much more complicated) when you realize there are birds that can’t fly, [...]
What is has always been going to be
I’ve been working for a while now on an ontology for representing events (which includes process, of course). One of the requirements of a system that is to monitor, govern, implement, or reason about processes is that it consider “situations”, which are things that happen or occur, including events and states. (See, for example, the [...]
Time for the next generation of knowledge automation
In preparing for my workshop at the Business Rules Forum in Las Vegas on November 5th, I have focused on the following needs in reasoning about processes, about events, and about or over time: Reasoning at a point within a [business] process Reasoning about events that occur over time. Reasoning about a [business] process (as [...]
Cyc is more than encyclopedic
I had the pleasure of visiting with some fine folks at Cycorp in Austin, Texas recently. Cycorp is interesting for many reasons, but chiefly because they have expended more effort developing a deeper model of common world knowledge than any other group on the planet. They are different from current semantic web startups. Unlike Metaweb’s [...]
The $50 Business Rule
Work on acquiring knowledge about science has estimated the cost of encoding knowledge in question answering or problem solving systems at $10,000 per page of relevant textbooks. Regrettably, such estimates are also consistent with the commercial experience of many business rules adopters. The cost of capturing and automating hundreds or thousands of business rules is [...]
Missing Goals and Requirements in Business Rules
Both of the following statements are true, but the first is more informative: Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) typically produce forward chaining production rules that are interpreted by[1] a business rules engine (BRE) based on the Rete Algorithm. BRMS typically generate rules that are interpreted by a BRE. First, dropping the word “production” before “rules” [...]
Managing Semantics, Vocabulary and Business Rules as Knowledge
A client recently asked me for guidance in establishing a center of excellence concerning business rules within their organization. Their objectives included: Accumulate requisite skills for productive success. Establish methodologies for productive, reliable and repeatable success. Accumulate and reuse content (e.g., definitions, requirements, regulations, and policies) across implementations, departments or divisions. Establish multiple tutorial and [...]