Workshop Description

Rules are becoming increasingly important in business modeling and requirements engineering, and as a high level programming paradigm especially in the engineering of e-business applications and of Semantic Web applications. In each of these the fields different rule languages and tools are being used.

Rules are used in applications to model and manage some parts of the application business logic. They are best used in applications with a dynamic business logic i.e. applications where changes in the business logic are frequently and they need to be immediately reflected in the application behavior.

Applications in domains such as insurance (for example, insurance rating), financial services (loans, claims routing and management, fraud detection), government (tax calculations), telecom customer (care and billing), e-commerce (personalizing the user's experience, recommender systems, auctions), and so on benefit greatly from using rule engines.

During the last ten years the business rules community has a large growth. Today we have:

• Business rules research groups such as www.businessrulesgroup.org and www.brcommunity.com
• Various rule engines vendors such as ILOG, Fair Isaac, Oracle Business Rules
• Open source rule engines such as JBoss Rule Engine
• Networks of excellence such as REWERSE.

Since a business rule is the same rule no matter in which language it is formalized, it is also important to support the interchange of rules between different systems and tools. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) initiated a rule interchange working group, RIF as well as the EU network of excellence REWERSE initiated R2ML.

This workshop seeks contributions that address theoretic foundations, practical techniques, empirical studies, experience, and lessons learned related, but not limited, to those listed in the topics of interests.

Topics of Interest

The workshop seeks contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Applications and Use Cases using languages for Enterprise Rules such as JBoss Rules and Oracle Business Rules (including Rule-based Auctions, Classification rules, Fuzzy Rules, Association Rules in Data Mining)
• Artificial Intelligence Rules and Rule Systems ( such as F-Logic and Jess)
• Best Practices in Business Rules Applications
• Combining rules and ontologies
• Implemented tools and systems
• Languages for Rule Interchange (such as RIF and R2ML)
• Modeling of Business Rules (including Production Rules and ECA Rules)
• Rule base Visualization, Verbalization, Validation, Verification and Exception Handling.
• Rule-based modeling of mechanisms, policies, strategies and contracts.
• Rule Engines Architecture
• Rules and Web Services Integration
• Transformation rules (such as XSLT, ATL)
• Web Rules and Semantic Web Applications

Format and Attendance

This will be a half (or full day) day workshop, a two hours invited talk, technical talks discussing competing visions for enterprise rules and rules for web services (final format will be dependent on submissions)

Invited Speaker

Intended audience

While the intended audience for this workshop includes those with experience or interest in (enterprise) rule languages and tools, as well as researchers with expertise in other areas such as:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Semantic Web (SW)
• Software Engineering (SE)
• Object Oriented Design (OOD)
• Object Oriented Programming (OOP)
• Unified Modeling Language (UML)
• Model-Driven Architecture (MDA)

This workshop wants to be a common space where researchers, in general, and young researchers specifically, can show their innovative rule-based applications.

Important Dates

Papers submission: June 15, 2007, Extended deadline: July 7, 15.00 CET

Notification of acceptance: July 30, 2007, August 7

Final paper and registration: September 1, 2007

Workshop date: TO BE ANNOUNCED (inside September 26-29, 2007)

Revised papers for post-proceedings: October 30, 2007

Workshop Co-Chairs:

Gerd Wagner, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany

Adrian Giurca, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany

Costin Badica, University of Craiova, Romania

Program Committee (to be completed)

• Costin Badica, University of Craiova, Romania
• Phillipe Bonnard, ILOG, France
• Vladan Devedzic, University of Belgrade, Serbia
• Jens Dietrich, Massey University, New Zealand
• Dragan Gasevic, Athabasca University, Canada
• Adrian Giurca, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany
• Grzegorz J. Nalepa, AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
• Viorel Negru, West University of Timisoara, Romania
• Paula Lavinia Patranjan, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Muenchen, Germany
• Mark Proctor, JBoss Rules, Redhat
• Dave Reynolds, Hewlett-Packard Semantic Web Research, England
• Silvie Spreeuwenberg, LibRT, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Kuldar Taveter, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Laurentiu Alexandru Vasiliu, DERI Galway, Ireland
• Sanja Vranes, Mihailo Pupin Institute, Belgrade, Serbia
• Gerd Wagner, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany

Local Organizers:

• Cosmin Bonchis, West University of Timisoara, Romania, <cbonchis at info.uvt.ro>
• Cornel Izbasa, Institute E-Austria, Romania, <cornel at ieat.ro>

Workshop Web Site

The workshop web site is http://oxygen.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/RuleApp2007/.

The submission web site is http://www.easychair.org/RuleApp2007/.

Any questions regarding submission of papers must be submitted by email (please put [RuleApps'2007] in the subject) to Adrian Giurca.