David S. Read

Another International Business Rules Forum has run its course.  It was great to see the mainstream acceptance of leveraging Business Rule Engines (BRE) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) to facilitate both business and integration agility.  Paul Evans and I presented on that topic at last year’s Forum.  This year it was clear that vendors and implementers are leveraging the approach broadly.

I met many great people and learned a lot about how businesses are succeeding with Business Process Management (BPM) tools to automate processes.  This year there was a lot of focus on expanding to focus on data and rules.  This relates to the discussions we have regarding the semantic web.  We need to leverage semantics throughout our systems, starting with the data.  Without appropriate semantic underpinnings the promise of automated service discovery and self-describing environments cannot be attained.

I thoroughly enjoyed having an opportunity to hear Dave McComb describe the value of semantics as we pursue the use of business rule environments.  His deep knowledge of the semantic landscape and his energy while discussing it certainly inspires one to learn more about the topic.  Thanks to him I continue to evolve my thinking around the creation and structuring of data dictionaries and vocabularies when documenting and implementing business rules. (more…)