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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.

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.

Oct 14 2008:: A new subject ... maybe a new category.

In some ways, business rule languages represent the "soft underbelly" of the business rules approach. They can be arcane pseudo-languages reserved for highly trained specialists, which tends to defeat the original purpose of business rules and limit their value to business people.

Best practices for business rules.

Updated Sept 7 2008: created

In Search of a Definition

First note that there really are no good definitions of business rule methodology available - the main link is to Wikipedia's definition of business rules, where they state simply "Business Rules Methodology is the process of capturing business rules in English, in real-time while empowering users to manage rules with a few simple steps". What are the simple steps that empowering users to manage rules ? And do they really have to be in English ?

One of the hot areas for cross-fertilization these days is business rules and service oriented architecture.

Business rule and object technology veteran Ian Graham has written an excellent book on the subject titled Business Rules Management and Service Oriented Architecture: A Pattern Language.

Updated Sept 29 2008:

See: Inference Engines on the Dev. site

It is important ot remember that term 'business rules technology' is often associated with business process managment. From the Wikipedia article for the Business Rule Approach:

Updated Sept 27 2008: more links

Most of the methodologies described in these business rule sites are waaay more than is needed for a simple 'semantic web rule' methodology. They are shooting for 99.99% completeness and accuracy in transaction process systems that may be driving multi-billion dollar business units. The goals of this enterprise are far more modest.

OASIS Universal Business Language standard. Not a far reaching standard, but probably more useful for small, resource-starved development projects.

From the standards document:

... The OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) is intended to help solve these problems by defining a generic XML interchange format for business documents that can be extended to meet the requirements of particular industries. Specifically, UBL 1.0 provides the following: