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Oct 8 2009: I've neglected the subject but there seems to be growing interest in business rules management.

James Taylor wrote an short article about business rule management ( BRM ) a few days ago, Business Rules Management – the misunderstood partner to process.

Oct 5 2009: Red Hat Asks Supreme Court To Nix Software Patents.  The range of comments is also interesting. 

Added Jan 20 2009: new section for Business Rules of Thumb
Updated Sept 16 2008: new links

The Grand Daddy of business rules sites is Business Rule Community, run by Ron Ross. They make you sign up in order to see most of their articles, but it's well worth the time to sign up. The content is excellent. They send you a newsletter about once a month - no big mailing lists, no spamming.

Feb 6 2009: Fair Isaac and ILOG Rules for COBOL.
Oct 20 2008: extracted from another article and expanded.

Every few years for the past 20 years, there has been an initiative to bring a higher level of information technology to the health care industry. It gives one a strong sense of having seen it all before.

Updated Oct 20 2008:

There were some interesting responses to an article at the athico.com blog site about rule engine performance.

A comment by Greg Barton outlines a disaster story about the inappropriate use of a rule engine to implement transaction processing for a large telecom application.

The general definition of ontology at Wikipedia ( versus the computer science definition given in the main link ) is "a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being". In some ways, the general definition is more appropriate to modeling organizations - the target audience for an organizational ontology is people, not computers.

The shortest and most intuitive definition of term ontology is 'a description of things that be'. For most purposes, it may be the best definition.

Why the SOA Reference Architecture ?

The OASIS SOA Reference Architecture is one of the best introductions to SOA, providing a complete, consistent and largely non-technical set of concepts and definitions for SOA technology. It may be the easiest way to understand SOA without digging through volumes of arcane technical standards and XML specifications.