Most of the technically-oriented content on the subject of inference engines is on the Development site.
Most of the content about technical aspects of Information Technology is on the Development site, including information about specific business-rule products, rule engine design, computer languages, etc. Follow one of the the links listed below for more technically oriented content.
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.
Tons of interesting aritcles at the System and Software Engineering lab (SSEL) ... many need a bit of googling to find them all.
Many links can be found on the VUB Publications page. Also check out the thesises ... thesii ? ...
The general basis of many of the articles is Aspect Oriented Programming, but the focus at VUB is business rules and rule-based systems.
What were the major obstacles that delayed the adoption of rule-based systems as a mainstream technology for the first 15 years of it existence ?
Many of the potential obstacles to adoption of the Semantic Web are similar if not identical to the prbblems faced by rule-based systems in the late 1980s. Therefore, the business rules methodology may be a good guide for development of the Semantic Web.
First, some basic principles.
A brief explanation about the unwieldy structure of this document ( as notes to myself if no one else ). The reader can skip this section by clicking on one of the links at the botton of the page.
This is the start of six sections devoted to the subject of rule-based systems. The sections started out as static HTML and are ( slowly ) being converted to the Drupal CMS, with extensive reorganization and revision. Frankly, this document has been difficult to write, for reasons described in "Defining Rule Based Systems".
Revised: Sept 25,2007
Definitions can be seen assertions about relationship between well-defined terms, in other words things are defined in terms of other things. The terms and relationships associated with "rule-based systems" are ill-defined and make a rigorous definition nearly impossible to achieve.
Updated Sept 7 2008: Found new link to Diane Cook lecture notes ...
One of the better and more accessible rule-based system links is the student notes for a course on AI given by Jocelyn Paine in 1996.