This year the Business Rules Forum folk were joined by the more academic-oriented RuleML folk for their US conference (RuleML’07). The sessions overlapped on the Thursday, and indeed John Hall of Model Systems invited me to do a quick 2-step from his BRForum panel on “Availability of the new Rule Standards” to the RuleML panel on “Web Rules and Events” - 5 minutes and a room apart.

The Standards panel was boringly non-controversial, with panelists from BMM, SBVR, RuleML and PRR/RIF. Next time I will write down the questions & answers for the interest of blog readers, but one I recall was from Microsoft’s internal IT folk wanting to know what they should specify in internal RFP s for business rule gathering (alongside requirements). My thought was that it would be pretty neat if Microsoft developed a PRR / RIF template (or even SBVR natural language model template) for MS Excel (TM of Microsoft etc).

The Web Events and Rules panel was probably more fun, as the other panelists (from Ontoprise, Business Semantics, Vulcan VC, and JBoss DROOLS) were from a wide range of web and rule disciplines. It seems the RuleML research community is getting more interested in Event Processing so we may see further CEP developments from this direction (as it was there were 3 ECA rule papers presented). For my part I simply reminded the audience of the existence of the EPTS, and indeed that there was an industry-academia liaison there.

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Overall BRForum this year was quite interesting, with a reasonable subset of interest to the general CEP community (and a whole lot more for anyone interested in the growth and future of CEP and the business management thereof). For those who could not attend, there is a good blog roll of the event.