The next event for your calendar is the 13th edition of a long running and successful conference series, covering “business rules” in all their business documentation and executable-decision forms.

Business Rules Forum, 17-21 Oct, Washington DC

So BRForum is being co-located with Business Analysis Forum and Business Process Forum as a part of the Building Business Capability 2010 conference. The BRForum part has up to 3 tracks covering Rule Capture, Rule Organisation and Deployment, and Decision Management. With another 3 equivalent tracks for BPForum, and 1 for the BA conference, there will be up to 7 parallel tracks! If that is not sufficient, there is also the “1st World Congress on Decision Tables” hosted by tabular-logic expert Jan Vanthienen and business rules expert Ron Ross, and afterwards the RuleML event.

End-users speaking here include UNUM, The Hartford, Blue Cross Blue Shield Minsesota, Goldman Sachs, Shell, Great West Life Assurance, JC Penney, Telecom NZ, State Farm, Wells Fargo, and Fanny Mae.

The CEP session is by yours truly covering “CEP, Rules Engine or Process Engine - What Businesses are Choosing” - something for everyone in all the conference tracks!

Conference costs are from $1395 covering all 3 events. I wonder if I should volunteer a general CEP Tutorial too? Would there be enough interest?

Time to synchronise diaries for the Fall convention and conference schedule… starting, in date order, with:

RulesFest, 11-14 Oct, San Jose CA

This covers the declarative rule-programming paradigm, as relevant to CEP as it is to conventional data processing, as exemplified by some of the more advanced CEP engines use of rule-based paradigms:

• Constraint specialist (and OpenRules chief) Jacob Feldman is talking about a CEP domain - “connecting the dots” - what we might call situation awareness. TIBCO watchers will note his keywords in the abstract: “always running”, “inference engine”, “pub sub”, “rules engine”, “finite state machine”, “multiple event channels”, … and “Excel” (!)  - with the latter being Jacob’s favorite “business user interface”.
• Oracle’s Hal Hildebrand is talking about a Distributed Rules Engine - in this case based on JESS (which may or may not mean Oracle’s version of said stalward Java Expert System Shell - if I recall the original abbreviation correctly). This might compare with TIBCO SPM as “an autonomic system for managing, monitoring and provisioning a large scale distributed system”.
• Starview’s Mack Mackenzie is talking about edBPM - “rule-based event processing systems and workflow business process management systems” with the comment that “unifying them can enable powerful next-generation use cases like real-time datamining and emergent pattern detection”.
• “Software Practices and Experiences of Rules in CEP Applications” by some old geezer might also be relevant…

Last year the event was “ORF” - and this year RulesFest again looks good value from $349 for software and system architects and designers, and should provide a more technical flavor compared to the more business-focused BRForum which we will preview next…

Prof. Adrian Paschke has posted the presentation made by himself, Prof. Harold Boley and myself on Semantic Complex Event Processing at SemTech this year (previously blogged about here and here) - and makes an interesting comparison with a prior public presentation in this area 2 years ago. Semantics in CEP were also one of the research topics at DEBS this year, too…

UPDATE: I’ve had a few requests for non-slideshare versions - so here is the PDF .

Translates as:

The Event Processing Technical Society (a diverse community - vendors, analysts, academics and end-users - interested in event processing) and

Object Management Group (an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry standards consortium)

Event Processing Community of Practice (a new advocacy group for event processing under the OMG umbrella) have announced an

Innovative Event Processing Application (one showing significant and innovative use of event processing, developed in the past 5 years, with some innovative use and a potential or realized value)

contest!

So which of the use cases we’ve mentioned here should enter, I wonder?

This year DEBS is in Europe, and in Kings College Cambridge, England - surely a model for the Harry Potter Hogwarts School of Architecture, with a quite amazing internal maze of staircases that entirely obviates any need for an on-site gym, while maybe requiring some kind of RFID-enabled roomkeys so event organisors can detect and rescue guests from obscure parts of the college.

Fellow Event Processing Technical Society colleagues Adrian Paschke (Freie Universitat Berlin) and Catherine Moxey (IBM CICS) and I presented a tutorial on the EPTS Event Processing Reference Architecture journey and development, with additional contributions from Alex Alves (Oracle) and Themis Palanos (University of Trento), on Monday this week. The presentation is now posted up on Slideshare (see below or here, or if in a Flash-free environment, check out the PDF).

One of the interesting audience questions was, if I recall correctly, why the EPTS Reference Architecture team did not differentiate their architecture more from that of, say, the BPM community? This was a little surprising as nowhere had we mentioned the words “business process” or “process orchestration”; neither had these really come up in the Reference Architecture discussions (other than as consumers of events). However, we did refer to the Fast Flower Delivery use case discussed in Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett’s forthcoming book on Event Processing, and Opher assured the audience that the event-driven processes therein were valid event processing requirements as opposed to BPM. An interesting point of reference here was the TIBCO user presentation at TUCON earlier this year that also found out the difference in BPM and CEP for their particular problem.

A related comment - from an end-user organisation - was that the sales teams of companies selling CEP solutions were often too quick to offer their BPM offerings rather than their CEP solutions. For an end-user to complain to vendors that “you are trying to sell me the wrong stuff” is pretty interesting! Wonder which vendors they were?