International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications Launched

RuleML-2007 is a new international meeting place for users, system providers, practitioners, developers, researchers and representatives of rule/event standardization efforts and open source rule communities to discuss the applicability and commercialization of rule technologies for enterprises and public organizations including event-handling rules. Co-located with the 10th International Business Rules Forum (http://www.businessrulesforum.com), the International Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2007) is the first symposium devoted to work on practical distributed rule/event technologies and rule/event-based applications which need language standards for rules operating in the context of, e.g., the Semantic Web, Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, Event-Driven Architectures and Service-Oriented Computing.

Participants will be offered an exciting venue to exchange new ideas, practical developments and their experience on issues related to the engineering, management, integration, interoperation and interchange of rules and events in enterprise application systems and open distributed environments such as the Web. RuleML-2007 will also enable delegates to better understand rules and event processing technologies and their potential, and how to exploit these technologies in their organizations.

The symposium will be held in Orlando, Florida, US, October 25/26, 2007 and will feature scientific research, industry, and demo papers and presentations, case study and practical experience presentations, show cases/demos presented in a RuleML-2007 Challenge and Invited Talks.

Symposium general chair Said Tabet, Inferware Corp., said "I am very pleased to announce the launch of this symposium. After a series of successful RuleML workshops and conferences, this is a new kind of event where the Web Logic community joins the established, practically oriented Forum of the Business Rules community to help cross-fertilizing between Web and Business Logic technology. Given the increasing maturity of rules and complex event processing technology, the RuleML symposium is an exciting venue to exchange new ideas, practical developments and your experience on issues related to the engineering, deployment, management, integration, interoperation and interchange of rules, and to discuss the commercial benefits that rules and event processing technology will deliver."

To share your ideas, results, and experience and learn more about rules Technology, RuleML-2007 invites all of you, including:

• IT Services, Rules and Event Processing system providers
• Representatives of, and participants in, rule standardization efforts
• Members of open source rules communities
• CTOs and Strategists of technology firms
• Information Architects and Strategic Technology Planners
• CIOs and Information Technology Managers
• Venture Capitalists and Investors
• CEOs of software startups
• Product Managers from software and hardware companies
• Data Analysts from major public and private organizations
• Academics and Researchers
• Software Developers
• Press and Analysts
• Technology Consultants

For further details please see the Symposium website http://2007.ruleml.org/.

For more information please contact: ruleml2007@easychair.org

International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications

(RuleML-2007) will take place, October 25-26, 2007, in Orlando, Florida <http://2007.ruleml.org>, co-located with The 10th International Business Rules Forum <http://www.businessrulesforum.com>. RuleML-2007 is devoted to practical distributed rule technologies and rule-based applications which need language standards for rules operating in the context of, e.g., the Semantic Web, Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, Event-Driven Architectures and Service-Oriented Computing Applications.

A RuleML-2007 Challenge with prizes will be organized to demonstrate tools, use cases, and applications.

Abstracts are due June 15, 2007.

Papers are due June 29, 2007.

Mandarax 3.4 released

We have just released Mandarax 3.4.
New features include:

1. Validation support.


2. A re-designed ZKB framework (with separated IO manager so that ZKB can
   interact with archives, folders, networks, DBs etc).


3. New ZKB driver supporting test cases (=validation).


4. The classes in the XKB framework has been declared as @deprecated -
   XKB does not support validation.


5. Udated CRM example, shows some new ZKB capabilities and validation.


6. Plenty of new test cases (in particular for ZKB).

Mandarax Event Calculus Module

Jens and I have started a new Mandarax subproject called Mandarax-EC (Event Calculus). The Event Calculus is a formalism for representing and reasoning about events and their effects in a logic programming framework.

The objective of this project is to provide a flexible Event Calculus formulation implemented in Mandarax which can be applied in different event-driven application scenarios and contexts.

A CVS module for the subproject and an initial implementation with support for the basic domain-independent part of the Event Calculus has been created. f you are interested, please check out the respective module from the source forge CVS and send us your comments.

Mandarax v 3.3.1 and Mandarax-JDBC v 3.3.1 released

We have released version 3.3.1 of the core project and of the new jdbc driver sub project. This are the major changes:

• Updated distribution - the jdbc driver has been separated from the core project
• Bugfix in ConstantTermImpl#getType. Thanks to Thomas Brown from Massey University for finding the bug.
• Bugfix for 961264 - white spaces in SQL commands, there are also a couple of new parser test cases to describe this bug. The grammar file has been updated.
• JDepend has been integrated into the build. The metrics can be found in the build/docs/jdepend folder (if you build it or download the prebuilt distribution).
• In the core project, we integrated a tool called ydocs that generates UML from class files. The models are embedded into the javadocs, really nice. For licensing reasons, we cannot distribute the ydocs license file, we use one owned by Massey University. Therefore, you will have to download the prebuilt edition if you want to see the models. They are located in the build/docs/uml folder.
• Updated jdom version b10.

Click here to download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=50817

Mandarax 3.3 released

Mandarax 3.3 has been released and can be downloaded from source forge. Here are the new changes:

1. Bugfix in JDBC Driver: connect method does not return null if URL does not mach. It turns out that the acceptsUrl method is not used by the DriverManager when deciding which driver is to provide a connection for a URL. Connect has to return null (throwing an exception does not work).
2. Change in DefaultSemanticEvaluation policy: ground complex terms are evaluated even if the predicate is not a "semantic" predicate. This is important to run simple recursive programs like factorial. For details and an example, also see test case test.org.mandarax.reference.TestRecursion1.
3. New classes InstanceOfPredicate and CastFunction in kernel.meta package.
   

UML Models

I have added a link to the Mandarax UML models to the mandarax web page. The models are generated by the ydoc doclet and hosted on my web site at Massey University NZ. To see the models, open the javadoc for a package or class and scroll down. The models are bitmaps, so one can click on artefacts and navigate through the model.

ydocs can be easily integrated with ANT, but it is not freeware / open source so I couldn't make it part of the distribution. Fortunately we (i.e. Massey) own a license which I use for teaching software engineering papers so I will keep the model up-to-date on my web site. To access the models directly follow this link: http://www-ist.massey.ac.nz/JBDietrich/mandarax/uml/.