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Advances in Rule Interchange and Applications

International Symposium, RuleML 2007, Orlando, Florida, October 25-26, 2007. Proceedings

herausgegeben von: Adrian Paschke, Yevgen Biletskiy

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Buchreihe : Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

The International Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2007), collocated in Orlando, Florida, with the Tenth International Business Rules Forum, was the first symposium devoted to work on practical distributed rule technologies and rule-based applications which need language standards for rules operating in the context of modern infrastructures, including the Semantic Web, intelligent multi-agent systems, event-driven architectures, and service-oriented computing applications. The symposium was organized by the RuleML Initiative, financially and technically supported by industrial companies (Top Logic, VIStology, and Inferware) and in cooperation with professional societies (ECCAI, AAAI, ACM, ACM SIGAPP, ACM SIGMIS, ACM SIGART, ACM SIGMOD, IEEE, IEEE Computer TCAAS, IEEE SMCS, BPM-Forum, W3C, OMG, and OASIS). The RuleML Initiative is organized by representatives from academia, industry and government for the advancement of rule technology, providing enhanced usability, scalability and performance. The goal of RuleML (www. ruleml. org) is to develop an open, general, XML-based family of rule languages as intermediaries between various ‘specialized’ rule vendors, applications, industrial and academic research groups, as well as standardization efforts such as OMG’s PRR or W3C’s RIF. A general advantage of using declarative rules is that they can be easily represented in a machine-readable and platform-independent manner, often governed by an XML schema. This fits well into today’s distributed, heterogeneous Web-based system environments. Rules represented in standardized Web formats can be discovered, interchanged and invoked at runtime within and across Web systems, and can be interpreted and executed on any platform.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Invited Papers

How Ontologies and Rules Help to Advance Automobile Development

Abstract

Nowadays the increasing complexity of cars has become a major challenge due to the growing rate of electronic components and software. This trend has an impact on all phases of the life cycle of the car. Especially during the process of testing cars and components semantic based approaches can help to increase the automation ratio of testing components and to find the needle in the haystack. Ontologies in combination with rules have proven to check specifications against test results and therefore deliver new insights.

Thomas Syldatke, Willy Chen, Jürgen Angele, Andreas Nierlich, Mike Ullrich

Are Your Rules Online? Four Web Rule Essentials

Abstract

Four principal Web rule issues constitute our starting points: I1) Formal knowledge representation can act as content in its own right and/or as metadata for content. I2) Knowledge on the open Web is typically inconsistent but closed ‘intranet’ reasoning can exploit local consistency. I3) Scalability of reasoning calls for representation layering on top of quite inexpressive languages. I4) Rule representation should stay compatible with relevant Web standards.

To address these, four corresponding essentials of Web rules have emerged: E1) Combine formal and informal knowledge in a Rule Wiki, where the formal parts can be taken as code (or as metadata) for the informal parts, and the informal parts as documentation (or as content) for the formal parts. This can be supported by tools for Controlled Natural Language: mapping a subset of, e.g., English into rules and back. E2) Represent distributed knowledge via a module construct, supporting local consistency, permitting scoped negation as failure, and reducing the search space of scoped queries. Modules are embedded into an ‘Entails’ element: prove whether a query is entailed by a module. E3) Develop a dual layering of assertional and terminological knowledge as well as their blends. To permit the specification of terminologies independent of assertions, the CARIN principle is adopted: a terminological predicate is not permitted in the head of a rule. E4) Differentiate the Web notion of URIs as in URLs, for access, vs. URNs, for naming. A URI can then be used: URL-like, for module import, where it is an error if dereferencing does not yield a valid knowledge document; URN-like, as an identifier, where dereferencing is not intended; or, as a name whose dereferencing can access its (partial) definition.

Harold Boley

Session: Business Process, Policy and IT Service Management and Modeling

KISS – Knowledge-Intensive Service Support: An Approach for Agile Process Management

Abstract

Automating business processes especially in the tertiary sector is still a challenge as they are normally knowledge intensive, little automated but compliance relevant. To meet these requirements the paper at hand introduces the KISS approach: modeling knowledge intensive services by enriching business rules semantically and linking rules to processes. We defined four types of rules, each focusing on a specific problem (resource allocation, constraints checking, intelligent branching and variable process planning and execution). For knowledge formalization we provide a 3-phase-procedure starting with a semi-formal representation (business model), followed by a formal representation (interchange model), leading to a machine executable representation (execution model).

Daniela Feldkamp, Knut Hinkelmann, Barbara Thönssen

Specifying Process-Aware Access Control Rules in SBVR

Abstract

Access control is an important aspect of regulatory compliance. Therefore, access control specifications must be process-aware in that they can refer to an underlying business process context, but do not specify when and how they must be enforced. Such access control specifications are often expressed in terms of general rules and exceptions, akin to defeasible logic. In this paper we demonstrate how a role-based, process-aware access control policy can be specified in the SBVR. In particular, we define an SBVR vocabulary that allows for a process-aware specification of defeasible access control rules. Because SBVR does not support defeasible rules, we show how a set of defeasible access control rules can be transformed into ordinary SBVR access control rules using decision tables as a transformation mechanism.

Stijn Goedertier, Christophe Mues, Jan Vanthienen

A Rule-Based Approach to Prioritization of IT Work Requests Maximizing Net Benefit to the Business

Abstract

With the growth of IT outsourcing opportunities, providers of managed IT services, such as HP, are compelled to exploit any possible economy of scale in dealing with emerging requirements of their customers. In this paper we present a methodology and a set of tools for enhanced executive decision support capability for the best allocation of scarce development resources through timelier and more accurate delivery of forecast indicators relative to the net benefit. Examples of such indicators are total forecast revenue for a bundle of work requests and total forecast cost reductions for a bundle of work requests. The tools deliver on reduced development cost and shorter time to value through the identification of synergies, duplication and commonality in work requests. For example, our approach will be able to identify in a reliable manner work that falls into these discrete categories pertaining to potential duplication thereby highlighting areas of potential cost reduction. Moreover they guarantee a reduced turn around time of delivery to trade customers through prioritization driven by net benefit and optimized release.

Maher Rahmouni, Claudio Bartolini, Abdel Boulmakoul

Session: Rule Languages and Interchange Standards

A Generic Module System for Web Rule Languages: Divide and Rule

Abstract

An essential feature in practically usable programming languages is the ability to encapsulate functionality in reusable modules. Modules make large scale projects tractable by humans. For Web and Semantic Web programming, many rule-based languages, e.g. XSLT, CSS, Xcerpt, SWRL, SPARQL, and RIF Core, have evolved or are currently evolving. Rules are easy to comprehend and specify, even for non-technical users, e.g. business managers, hence easing the contributions to the Web. Unfortunately, those contributions are arguably doomed to exist in isolation as most rule languages are conceived without modularity, hence without an easy mechanism for integration and reuse. In this paper a generic module system applicable to many rule languages is presented. We demonstrate and apply our generic module system to a Datalog-like rule language, close in spirit to RIF Core. The language is gently introduced along the EU-Rent use case. Using the Reuseware Composition Framework, the module system for a concrete language can be achieved almost for free, if it adheres to the formal notions introduced in this paper.

Uwe Aßmann, Sacha Berger, François Bry, Tim Furche, Jakob Henriksson, Paula-Lavinia Pătrânjan

Towards Semantically Grounded Decision Rules Using ORM +

Abstract

Recently, ontologies are proposed for many purposes to assist decision making, such as representing terminology and categorizing information. Current ontology-based decision support systems mainly contain semantically rich decision rules. In order to ground the semantics, we formalize those rules by committing them to domain ontologies. Those semantically grounded decision rules can represent the semantics precisely, thus improve the functionalities of many available rule engines. We model and visualize the rules by means of a novel extension of ORM. These rules are further stored in an XML-based markup language, ORM⁺ ML, which is a hybrid language of Rule-ML and ORM-ML. We demonstrate in the field of on-line customer management.

Yan Tang, Peter Spyns, Robert Meersman

Towards Ontological Commitments with Ω-RIDL Markup Language

Abstract

In the DOGMA (Developing Ontology-Grounded Methods and Applications) ontology engineering approach, ontology construction starts from an uninterpreted base of elementary fact types, called lexons, which are mined from linguistic descriptions. Applications that ontologically commit to such a lexon base are assigned a formal semantics by mapping the application symbols to paths in this lexon base. Besides specifying which concepts are used, we restrict how they may be used and queried with semantic constraints, or rules, based on the fact-based database modeling method NIAM/ORM. Such ontological commitments are specified in the Ω-RIDL language. In this paper we present the Ω-RIDL Markup Language and illustrate with a case from the field of Human Resources Management.

Damien Trog, Yan Tang, Robert Meersman

Session: Business Rules, Rule Engines and Applications

Recovering Business Rules from Legacy Source Code for System Modernization

Abstract

By using several reverse engineering tools and techniques, it is possible to extract business rules from the legacy source code that are easy to understand by the non-IT experts. These business rules can be used at different stages of system modernization. System maintainers can use the rules to locate in the code parts affected by a change in a rule. Business analysts can use those rules as means to aide understanding of the system at a business level. The extracted rules can serve as source of documentation and possible input for configuring a new system. This paper presents a novel approach for extracting business rules from legacy source code and application of the results at different stages of system modernization.

Erik Putrycz, Anatol W. Kark

An Approach for Bridging the Gap Between Business Rules and the Semantic Web

Abstract

Business rules should improve the human communication inside of an enterprise or between business partners and must be therefore independent of implementations in IT systems. As a long-term goal, business rules should be guaranteed by all IT applications of an enterprise. A first step to define and to standardize what business rules are is an OMG initiative to specify a metamodel for business rules and the vocabulary on which business rules are defined. The result of OMG’s effort is the SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) specification that we took as starting point of our investigations to automate business rules. There are multiple ways for transforming business rules. In this paper we show how SBVR based vocabulary and rules can be translated by model transformation chains into Semantic Web Languages. In our approach we use OWL and R2ML (REWERSE Rule Markup Language). Both are languages with a high potential for a broad usage in future rule-based applications.

Birgit Demuth, Hans-Bernhard Liebau

Take - A Rule Compiler for Derivation Rules

Abstract

Rule engines have been used successfully in recent years in order to improve the agility of enterprise applications. Most existing rule engines focus on production rules, neglecting another important class of rules, derivation rules. We point out that derivation rules are very useful in many application scenarios, and present Take, a rule compiler for Java. Take compiles derivation rules into optimized, reflective code that can be deployed into running applications.

Jens Dietrich, Jochen Hiller, Bastian Schenke

Session: RuleML-2007 Challenge

The OO jDREW Engine of Rule Responder: Naf Hornlog RuleML Query Answering

Abstract

Rule Responder is an intelligent multi-agent system for collaborative teams and virtual communities that uses RuleML as its rule interchange format. The system allows these virtual organizations to collaborate in an effective semi-automatic manner, and is implemented as a Web-based application on top of the Enterprise Service Bus Mule. It supports rule execution environments (rule/inference engines) such as the Prova distributed Semantic Web rule engine and OO jDREW (Object Oriented java Deductive Reasoning Engine for the Web). The paper describes the role of OO jDREW for answering queries against rule bases in the Naf Hornlog RuleML sublanguage for the real-world use case of a symposium organization.

Benjamin Larry Craig

Querying the Semantic Web with SWRL

Abstract

The SWRLTab is a development environment for working with SWRL rules in Protégé-OWL. It supports the editing and execution of SWRL rules. It also provides mechanisms to allow interoperation with a variety of rule engines and the incorporation of user-defined libraries of methods that can be used in rules. Several built-in libraries are provided, include collections of mathematical, string, and temporal operators, in addition to operators than can be used to effectively turn SWRL into a query language. This language provides a simple but powerful means of extracting information from OWL ontologies. Used in association with a relational data importation tool that we have developed called DataMaster, this query language can be also used to express knowledge-level queries on data imported from relational databases.

Martin O’Connor, Samson Tu, Csongor Nyulas, Amar Das, Mark Musen

Implementation of Production Rules for a RIF Dialect: A MISMO Proof-of-Concept for Loan Rates

Abstract

In June 2006, the Mortgage Industry Maintenance Organization (MISMO) began an initiative to help facilitate the electronic exchange of business rules between trading partners in the mortgage vertical. The Business Rules Exchange Workgroup (BREW) was subsequently formed to generate a charter and lead the adoption within the industry. BREW set out to create a proof-of concept (POC) to solve an often mentioned need for the exchange of rules: loan application pricing. A modified Production Rules (PR) extension to the working draft of the Rules Interchange Format (RIF) core design was developed by ILog and the well established MISMO schema was used as the ontology to share and execute a ruleset among ILOG JRules & JBOSS Rules in a distributed environment. A ruleset consisting of pricing rules were created using a decision table. ILOG Business Rules Engine(BRE) serialized these rules into a RIF ruleset. Using web services over HTTP , this ruleset was made available for consumption via web services allowing a client tool to consume the ruleset and push to a JBOSS Rules engine that had been exposed as a web service. Once the two systems shared the same ruleset, data payloads could then be sent to each rules engine for rule execution.

Tracy Bost, Phillipe Bonnard, Mark Proctor

Session: Rules, Reasoning, and Ontologies

Adapting the Rete-Algorithm to Evaluate F-Logic Rules

Abstract

The evaluation of production rules is typically based on the Rete-algorithm. The topic of the current paper is to investigate, whether set-oriented bottom-up evaluation of rules in deductive databases can also take advantage of the Rete approach. We report on our implementation of the Rete algorithm as one possible evaluation technique inside the F-Logic rule evaluation engine Florid. We demonstrate, that in situations in which several rules share common subgoals a considerable improvement of the execution time can be gained by the Rete approach. We show this by means of benchmark programs, also comparing our results with the performance of Jess, a production rule system relying on Rete.

Florian Schmedding, Nour Sawas, Georg Lausen

Rule Definition for Managing Ontology Development

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to ontology development through the application of declarative logic programming. Our method employs rules for the purpose of prototyping new ontology versions by decoupling the process of concept definition from the application of descriptive logics (DL) and advanced class representations. By generating new ontology versions on-the-fly we can test updates to the ontology design. This employment of rules expands on current efforts of translation and merging of ontologies. By employing this technique, we can support a pragmatic approach to the management and integration of instance data thus realizing a rapid-prototyping approach to the testing of potential updates to ontologies. Examples of this technique are presented utilizing a subset of the OWL-DL specification through the implementation of the Jena API. Advantages include the rapid testing of updated ontology representations (including the efficient remapping of instance data) and an efficient means of Ontology querying. Eventual benefits include Ontology versioning support and tool development to support the automatic engineering of instance data.

David A. Ostrowski

Integrating Rules and Description Logics with Circumscription for the Semantic Web

Abstract

In this paper, we propose \(\mathcal{DL}clog\), a new hybrid formalism combining Description Logics(DL) and Logic Programming(LP) for Semantic Web serving as an extension to \(\mathcal{DL}+log\)[17]. By \(\mathcal{DL}clog\), users can reason nonmonotonically with DL ontology. We introduce negative dl-atoms to the bodies of the rules, and extend Nonmonotonic Semantics (NM-Semantics) of \(\mathcal{DL}+log\) to evaluate dl-atoms with circumscriptive models of DL ontology in the sense of parallel circumscription. In this way, negative dl-atoms are treated nonmonotonically, while the formalism still remains faithful to NM-Semantics, DL and LP. We also present a decision procedure for the extended semantics based on a restricted form of \(\mathcal{DL}clog\), in which DL ontologies are written with \(\mathcal{ALCIO}\) or \(\mathcal{ALCQO}\) and roles are not allowed to occur in negative dl-atoms.

Fangkai Yang, Xiaoping Chen

XML Data Compatibility from the Ground Up

Abstract

While XML may have emerged as the de facto format of data exchanged by peers, it faces the exact same evolutionary challenges that has plagued preceding lingua francas. As peers grow organically, they will inevitably generalize or specialize the XML messages they give and take, at the risk of breaking down existing relationships. If anything, change-induced outages are more likely to occur due to XML, since it promotes loose-coupling. To ensure that peers are interoperable, we lay down some ground rules of compatibility, by generally applying set theory on the extensions of the OWL classes/properties representing XML concepts/relations. Specifically, we take a hand-in-glove approach where the statements of compatibility (based on RIF-esque rules) tag along as corollaries to those of XML (based on OWL ontologies). Along the lines of two-pass compilers, we first parse the XML Infoset into an intermediate OWL representation, prior to analyzing the semantics therein.

Karthick Sankarachary

Session: Reaction Rules and Rule Applications

Exploiting E-C-A Rules for Defining and Processing Context-Aware Push Messages

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to show that the E-C-A paradigm offers an excellent approach for specifying the behavior of context-aware information push services. Such a service enables its operator to provide the users with tailored messages related to their current situation (context). The paper introduces CAIPS, an implementation of such a service for the tourism domain. The underlying E-C-A rules are presented and the design of the associated rule-engine is described. The engine’s rule-interpreter is based on event-notification services and the object-oriented query-language HQL. The paper further presents a graphical high-level editor which supports business-experts in “writing” the CAIPS E-C-A rules. The presented approach enables the rapid development of new tailored messages (related to the user’s context) without the need to modify the underlying application, i.e. without the trouble of writing new code for new message types.

Thomas Beer, Jörg Rasinger, Wolfram Höpken, Matthias Fuchs, Hannes Werthner

The Use of Ontologies and Rules to Assist in Academic Advising

Abstract

Undergraduate academic advisors, schools of graduate studies, and other organizations are often responsible for understanding and evaluating high-school and university transcripts from culturally and organizationally different institutions. Such a task raises several problems including diverse grading approaches, incompatible academic credit systems, and translating between languages. Although many such problems are most sensitive in a world (or international) evaluation, they can occur between institutions within the same country as well. The present paper proposes a possible methodology toward overcoming such conflicts using a University-Course-Credit-Grade (UCCG) ontology and translation rules for interoperability of credit systems and grade systems between institutions. As proof of concept, the UCCG ontology is initially populated with example instances from four institutions, using Protégé-2000 to build the ontology, RDF(S) to store it, and POSL to store the university instances and translation rules.

Girish R. Ranganathan, J. Anthony Brown

Towards Knowledge Extraction from Weblogs and Rule-Based Semantic Querying

Abstract

Weblogs (blogs) becomes a very popular medium for exchanging information, opinions and experiences nowadays. However, since new blog pages are constantly issued, finding out helpful information from them becomes a tedious and time consuming work. This paper proposes a system for extracting knowledge hidden in blog pages in Chinese. Before extraction, blog pages are clustered into categories. Then for each category, the knowledge can be extracted based on domain ontologies. Using restrained natural language processing, user can query the KB and the helpful knowledge will be returned based on reasoning about the individuals. KEROB, a prototype of our system, is designed and implemented to fulfill the above functions. The experimental results indicate the superiority of our system.

Xi Bai, Jigui Sun, Haiyan Che, Jin Wang

Complex Information Management Using a Framework Supported by ECA Rules in XML

Abstract

It is every organization’s desire to incorporate best practice into its enterprise. This incorporation gives rise to the need to maintain information that could be viewed as complex. Managing this complex information poses a major challenge to the area of information management. This paper presents a framework for the incorporation of best practice and subsequent management of the resulting complex information. The paper also presents an approach to supporting this framework by using the ECA rule paradigm with an XML-based language, called AIM, for specifying and querying best practice and the complex information.

Bing Wu, Essam Mansour, Kudakwashe Dube

AIM: An XML-Based ECA Rule Language for Supporting a Framework for Managing Complex Information

Abstract

This paper presents an XML-based event-condition-action (ECA) rule language, AIM, for supporting the SEM framework and approach to the computer-based incorporation of best practice in daily work and the subsequent management of the resulting complex information. SEM framework provides knowledge and information management support in terms of three planes: the specification plane, the execution plane and the manipulation plane. AIM language is an assembly of declarative language modules for supporting the three planes of the SEM framework and envisages its use within the context of XML and databases.

Essam Mansour, Kudakwashe Dube, Bing Wu

Backmatter

Titel: Advances in Rule Interchange and Applications
herausgegeben von: Adrian Paschke
Yevgen Biletskiy
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-540-75975-1
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75974-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75975-1

Springer Professional

Über dieses Buch

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Invited Papers

How Ontologies and Rules Help to Advance Automobile Development

Are Your Rules Online? Four Web Rule Essentials

Session: Business Process, Policy and IT Service Management and Modeling

KISS – Knowledge-Intensive Service Support: An Approach for Agile Process Management

Specifying Process-Aware Access Control Rules in SBVR

A Rule-Based Approach to Prioritization of IT Work Requests Maximizing Net Benefit to the Business

Session: Rule Languages and Interchange Standards

A Generic Module System for Web Rule Languages: Divide and Rule

Towards Semantically Grounded Decision Rules Using ORM +

Towards Ontological Commitments with Ω-RIDL Markup Language

Session: Business Rules, Rule Engines and Applications

Recovering Business Rules from Legacy Source Code for System Modernization

An Approach for Bridging the Gap Between Business Rules and the Semantic Web

Take - A Rule Compiler for Derivation Rules

Session: RuleML-2007 Challenge

The OO jDREW Engine of Rule Responder: Naf Hornlog RuleML Query Answering

Querying the Semantic Web with SWRL

Implementation of Production Rules for a RIF Dialect: A MISMO Proof-of-Concept for Loan Rates

Session: Rules, Reasoning, and Ontologies

Adapting the Rete-Algorithm to Evaluate F-Logic Rules

Rule Definition for Managing Ontology Development

Integrating Rules and Description Logics with Circumscription for the Semantic Web

XML Data Compatibility from the Ground Up

Session: Reaction Rules and Rule Applications

Exploiting E-C-A Rules for Defining and Processing Context-Aware Push Messages

The Use of Ontologies and Rules to Assist in Academic Advising

Towards Knowledge Extraction from Weblogs and Rule-Based Semantic Querying

Complex Information Management Using a Framework Supported by ECA Rules in XML

AIM: An XML-Based ECA Rule Language for Supporting a Framework for Managing Complex Information

Backmatter

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