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Humble Beginnings of Business Rules - From Toy to Powerhouse

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.

From Powerhouse of Business Transaction Processing to Personal Knowledge Server ?

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.

The Semantic Web ?

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.