From humble beginnings in the 1990s, business rules technology evolved into commercial-grade platforms capable of driving big and complex systems for Fortune 500 companies. Some technical infrastructures cost millions of dollars to implement and deploy. Business rules technology has become essential to the functioning of core business processes. Every day, many millions of business transactions pass through rule-based customer ordering systems, ATM and credit card verification systems and an endless variety of business applications. Rules are major components of the core business processes.
I think that a technological threshold has been reached and that rules technology is no longer the the sole domain of large-scale business processes. It can be made easy enough and powerful enough to support simple problem solving by ordinary, non-technical individuals. With the advent of inexpensive web hosting services and web-logging technology, a combination of workstation and server side functions can implement a sort of personal knowledge server. The critical factor is to create an the interface that is simply enough for everyday, non-techie to understand and use.
I believe that business rules technology can adapted to a vision of the Semantic Web. However, developing a rule systems technology for a Semantic Web may require significant modifications and extensions to existing concepts and tools. In fact, it is not clear what the term 'Semantic Web' means and the challenge of resolving competing visions and definitions is taken up in a later section covering the Semantic Web.
That invaluable tool, the Wikipedia, has the cleanest and concise definition of the term 'business rule' I've encountered. The Wikipedia defines business rule as:
Declarative
A business rule is a statement of truth about an organization. It is an attempt to describe the operations of an organization, not an attempt to prescribe how an organization should operate. This is why business rules are said to be discovered or observed and not created.
Atomic
A rule is either completely true or completely false; there are no shades of gray. For example a rule for an airline that states passengers may upgrade to first class round-trip tickets if seats are available and they pay the fare increase does not imply that this deal is available for just one leg of the journey.
Distinct, independent constructs
Separate the things that define your business (the rules) from the processes (i.e. strategies and tactics). Don't build complex and cyclical dependencies - simplify and flatten the constructs.
Expressed in natural language
In order to appeal to the broadest audience, it is almost always best to express business rules in a natural language without the use of a lot of technical jargon.
Business, not technology, oriented
For example, a company's business rules should not be foreign to a knowledgeable customer.
Business, not technology, owned
Business rules come from business decisions. These are independent from implementation decisions.
Haley has an interesting take on the definition of business rule.
Business rule :is a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. A business rule asserts business structure to control or influence the behavior of the business, i.e. a process or procedure.
Note that the definition treats procedures as a legitimate expression of knowledge about a business process of some sort. In the field of Business Process Modeling, the sequence of operations in a business processes can become something like a business rule in itself.
It is an import distinction and the correct view, a process-based or rule-based point of view, depends largely on the category and level of interaction of the business rule under consideration.
Business rules tend to appear at the enterprise level. Processes tend to use business rules in a 'localized' way, for instance by geographic location or by market segment. A certain set of business rules can play a role in some aspect or 'facet' of a particular business process. They might even be categorized along several dimensions simultaneously, for instance by geographic location and by market segment at the same time.
The demands of large globalized business applications can generate massive numbers of "localized" rules by combinatorial explosion of 'sub-types', sometimes many thousands of individual categories of business rules. In those situations, a bottom-up, process-based approach to business rules analysis can be very effective.
Note first that there is a big difference between The Semantic Web to A Semantic Web. In this version of the Semantic Web, knowledge shared by individuals. A web would be owned by its participants or subscribers rather the general public, something to be actively joined, perhaps more like the basic model of a Wiki than an openly accessible public site.
If there were a version of business rules called "semantic web rules", what might its definition look like ? Certainly, the definition should include a very basic set of characteristics pertaining to the Semantic Web. It would also need to stay as close as possible to the classic definition of business rules or there is a danger that the entire meaning and "discipline" of the methodology could be lost.
| Owed by Originators and Stakeholders | Web rules are owned by their originators of the knowledge, rather than by casual users or a technically oriented cadre of web developers. |
| Knowledge Focused | Web rules should describe common knowledge-intensive problems and issues encountered on the Web and their resolution. |
| Unique | Web rules refer to a single subject at one time. |
| Clear and Unambiguous | Web rules make a clear statement of things known about the Web and uses a well-defined terminology. |
| Declarative | Web rules make assertions about things important to understanding and using available resources. Note that in many definition of business rules, declarative mans that they do not describe sequential knowledge or processing logic. |
| Well-Formed | Web rules are stated in a formal rule language. |
The last three requirements for business rules may raise an important issue for using business rule technology in the Semantic Web.
Note that the last three characteristics listed above ( that is, clear, declarative and well-formed ) may restrict the form that web rules can take. To some extent, they may also limit the usefulness of classic business rules as a vehicle for defining things in the relatively unstructured environment of the Semantic Web.