The Semantic Technology Information Day at the last OMG meeting included a short spiel on Complex Event Processing, relevant semantic models for CEP, and some of the appropriate standards (ODM or Ontology Definition Metamodel, and PRR or Production Rule Representation).

The talks were much more interesting than one would expect from a seminar containing the word “Semantics” in the title (especially for those used to dry, academic claims from the Semantic Web community). For example, Chris Welty of IBM (also co-chair of the W3C RIF effort) started the proceedings with an actually interesting and relevant talk on the role of semantics and knowledge in information systems; the other interesting talks included, for example, the complexities of healthcare ontologies. Presentations will eventually be up on the OMG site.

The main way semantic models like OWL can influence the IT models of CEP is via ODM, mapping ontologies to UML Class and Event and their related and dependent behaviors (State, PRR, etc). In addition, run-time semantic models can potentially assist with things like text analytics.

The CEP presentation can be found here.

Last week’s OMG standards meeting included an interesting presentation by John Hall of Model Systems (and SSADM fame) on the role of (business) events in linking business (policy-type) rules to business processes. John normally deals with business modeling artifacts like OMG BMM and OMG SBVR, so it was interesting to see how this community sees “business events” as being the key glue between “business rules” and “business processes” - something that Ron Ross has also been advocating [*1].

Now, neither BMM nor SBVR are particularly “event-aware” standards, and the goal for SBVR pundits is to exploit such business rules to determine the content of (and ensure enforcement within) business processes (as defined in models like BPMN). John’s presentation was basically how “events” linked policy-type business rules to business processes (in BPMN). Interestingly John proposed analyzing the available terms and facts for appropriate events (as in “new”, “update”, “delete” etc) through a cross-reference table. Compared to event processing IT systems:

• the observable business events tend to be what is already on the event bus, and are very much a subset of all possible CRUD operations on all available business concepts
• complex events often align to interesting “business facts”, and CEP is about determining, from some prior sequence of other events, when these business events occur (or will occur).

Hopefully this will be the start of business modelling of abstract events to help join the business rule documenters with the business rule automators - and its my opinion that event-driven rule-based systems are probably going to prove the easiest to join this gap.

Notes:

[1] This is an interesting Lithuanian paper that looks at rules in UML from both an SBVR and IT perspective. Note the mention of state models, production rules and events - which should be familiar to any user of TIBCO BusinessEvents (although as existing COTS prior art this didn’t warrant a reference in the paper).

The “season to be jolly” is coming up fast, which given the world news might be more of a challenge this year. Therefore I quote the following,  found accidentally while researching for a blog post the other day, and attributed to the late Spike Milligan:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, “OK, now what?”

Although we contributed one session (on PRR and decisions) to the RuleML conference co-hosted with BR Forum this year, I missed some of the other but nontheless significant talks. I see the keynotes are now officially published, so below are some reviews of the presentations from the web:

• Michael Kifer of F-logic fame presented on the W3C RIF Rule Interchange Format. This is a nice intro to RIF, by one of its main authors. Interestingly RIF is the logical (pun unintended) successor to much of the old RuleML research work on logic language markups, although somehow I doubt we’ll see RIF08 next year instead. My only contrary thought about this presentation is that, for the wider audience, it could have listed some of the other rule / logic languages currently in progress in the R&D communities, and how they might fit in a hierarchy of RIF dialects.
• Paul Haley of Automata presented on the need for a merged ontology for process, rules, events and state, extending the ideas he presented in the BRForum session earlier. This presentation directly addressed the CEP community, too:
  • The knowledge management handled by the BRMS community should also impact CEP and BPM…
    • For example, see TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager (although we don’t make any specific claims around knowledge management per se, you can see where Paul was heading here).
  • The integration of rules and process is currently inadequate, with rules playing 2nd fiddle to process
    • Funnily enough there was a similar discussion at this week’s BPM Think Tank in the context of semantic BPM versus say rule representations of process (e.g. for the purposes of say verification of process steps, looking for redundancy, etc).
  • Questions whether TIBCO will build a BRMS to compete in BPM…
    • TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager already provides a BRMS for event-driven automated processes…
  • PRR is inadequate but probably more important than RIF
    • Certainly PRR 1.0, sans expression language, is “inadequate” compared to what it should provide with a common expression language. To be fair, RIF PRD can be considered (loosely) to be PRR compatible (and mappings should be straightforward), and hopefully they will remain in sync. But PRR could help bridge the semantic gap - for example be used in both CEP and BPM (and SOA) models.
  • Natural language or spreadsheet metaphors are critical
    • So far, TIBCO BusinessEvents’ Decision Manager supports the latter.
  • There is a need for semantic BPM and semantic CEP
    • Researchers tend to agree here, but the customer benefits still need to be proven. Another PhD topic?
  • When will major BPM/CEP/rule vendors have ontologies?
    • Arguably only TIBCO fits in this group (with IBM and Oracle being only “minor” and “too new” in some of these categories). And we are probably more interested in customer / domain ontologies rather than cross-computing-platform ontologies. So far.
• Ben Grosof of Vulcan presented his latest knowledge representation project, SILK. I didn’t get to speak to Ben about the importance of time and events in knowledge representations, and these are not really covered in his presentation, but I got the impression Ben does understand this.
• David Luckham of Stanford presented on CEP. David probably should have done a keynote for the main Business Rules Forum rather than just present to the rule markup community. Oh well, maybe next year…

The other presentations are up too. I won’t go through all of them, but in particular note Mark Linehan’s talk on an ontology for time (and thence an ideal basis for a business-level CEP language), and Harold Boley and Ben Craig’s personal agents (using distributed rule systems like BusinessEvents allows). Mark Linehan won the best paper award, justifiably, for his work on mapping SBVR rules (i.e. business policy constraints) to UML classes and OCL (i.e. object constraints) - which will be interesting to compare with Microsoft’s research work in this area.

Paul Haley, no doubt somewhat bemused that his old company (still using his name) is now under the Oracle banner, presented his proposal for the development of an upper ontology joining together the concepts of events (and event processing), process, state and rules.

Not surprisingly, given that TIBCO is here presenting event processing in a business rules conference, and is a vendor of a leading BPM product, this is somewhat relevant to us. Points covered included:

• Few rules are used to drive processes to make them dynamic; normally BPM vendors concentrate on single-execution point decision services.
  That is a fair point, but at TIBCO we would point to iProcess Conductor, and even BusinessEvents CEP being used to control iProcess workflows.
• Conventional rule systems languages don’t handle temporal aspects very well.
  Again, true. Paul’s example was the statement “underwriting precedes approval“, which seems more to me to define a process diagram constraint rather than something a BRMS would handle. 
• Process people know about events, they just don’t dwell on them.
  I think this quip went wa-a-a-y over the heads of the audience…
• Decisions ignore process state.
  More likely, the process state is implicit in the decision service. Which certainly implies a potential for issues with re-use and maintenance.
• The semantics of process, state, rule and event are not joined, but need to be.
  That is Paul’s thesis.
  • He commented further on the lack of semantic progress (bravely, considering the SBVR experts in the room) with the example that Siebel represents money types as an amount, currency, and time. The latter is needed as conversions between currencies are time-dependent.
  • I had always thought semantic-meeting-of-the-minds was the role of OMG BPDM, proposed as the “semantic BPMN 2.0″. But BPDM’s capability to model state and rules (and probably continuous events) is still unproven, AFAIK.

Paul tag’s this area as a whole as “Semantic Corporate Performance Management”.