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The AAAI seems to be rumbling to life. An extended quote from their call for participation in the upcoming AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium Series ( with a few explanatory links inserted ):

Knowledge representation in general, and rule based representations in particular, are core areas of artificial intelligence. Research in these areas strongly influences standards on the web like RuleML or the W3C standards OWL and SWRL. Advancing the theoretical underpinnings and practical impact of these technologies will be an ongoing challenge.

On the other hand, business rules and semantic business process management are growing research and application areas. Business rules strive to meet the increasing requirements of transparency and compliance: making sure that all stakeholders comply with all rules and regulations at any place and any time. Business processes are derived form the strategy of an enterprise, and define the requirements of information systems. here, ai methods such as semantic modelling, knowledge validation, automated planning and intelligent agents will play ever increasing roles.

Note the areas they identify as ripe for "ai methods", especially representing knowledge and defining business requirements. The section continues:

Both areas—business rules and business process management—make use of model driven knowledge representations, often in conjunction with application-oriented modeling tools. In the last few years, both communities have realized the potential of knowledge representations with precise semantics. For example, OMG is bringing semantics into business rules with semantics of business vocabulary and business rules (SBVR), although without making full use of the benefits and standards already achieved with AI’s semantic technologies in the semantic web and ontology engineering. Similar observations can be made for other aspects of rule based systems that have already been addressed earlier within AI (for example, rule capture, inferencing and explanation).

While standards for business process definition and execution have been put forward, there is increasing research interest in combining business processes with semantic technologies. In particular, the concept of Semantic Web Services promises a new level of agility in process execution where AI can contribute insights and technologies from knowledge representation, reasoning and planning.

The key phrases above seem to be precise semantics and semantic technologies such as ontology engineering. From a pragmatic standpoint, the tools required for semantic modeling, knowledge validation and truth maintenance are extremely complex to use without sophisticated tree differencing and merging algorithms working behind the scene to make the structures more tractable to ordinary human beings. Knowledge versioning can make it even more challenging. This would be a prime area for applying the AI methods mentioned above.

The semantics of the term Semantic Web Services as a particular concept is unclear - the author may be referring to the Semantic Web Services Initiative. It may also refer to the AAAI First International Semantic Web Services Symposium in 2004

In the last paragraph, they state that the aim of of the call for participation is "identifying and advancing the most promising points of cross-fertilization" between business rules, semantic technologies, and business process management. It will be interesting to see the result.