systems that know and understand and think and learn
Externalizing enterprise decision management using service-oriented architecture orchestrated by business process management makes increases agility and allows continuous performance improvement, but…
How do you implement the rules of EDM in an SOA decision service? Continue reading “Agile decision services without XML details”
Recent posts on money and time have produced some excellent comments and correspondence. There is even recent OMG effort that is right on the money, at least concerning time. For details, see the Date-Time Foundational Vocabulary RFP. I am particularly impressed with SBVR “Foundation” Vocabularies, which I understand Mark Linehan of IBM presented last week at an OMG meeting in DC[1].
Mark’s suggestions include establishing standard upper ontologies for:
I will skip operations for now since they are not taxonomic concepts but functional relationships involving such concepts. I believe the post on CEP and BPM covered time in adequate detail and the post on Siebel’s handling of foreign exchange covered the currency exchange aspects of money. It only touched on the more general concept of amounts that I will focus on here.
The remaining concepts are common to almost every application conceivable. They are some of the most primitive, domain-independent concepts of a critical and practical upper ontology. They include: Continue reading “Ontology of time in progress – amounts needed”
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:
As discussed here, this focuses comes from Continue reading “RuleBurst re-brands as Haley Limited”
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”
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”
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:
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”
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:
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”
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”
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:
Two things are immediately obvious.
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”
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:
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”