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The article is devoted to Windows Workflow Foundation ( WF ) and the Microsoft Business Rule Engine (MS BRE), but it is a good introduction to the workings of almost any inference/rule engine.

Updated: Feb 26 2008 

One of the truly essential technologies to enable rule-based systems and the semantic web is debugging rule bases. There are several articles describing the basic components of an RBS development environment and how they can be employed to debug a rule base.

It is interesting that the general view of rule-based systems as "rule-based expert systems" begs the question: is there such a thing as non-rule-based expert systems or rule-based non-expert systems ? I think the answer is yes.

For instance, the KBSC site mentions that the company "deals mostly with rulebased systems in the business world where they are sometimes referred to as Business Rule Management Systems, BRMS". In other words, rule-based non-expert systems, also know as business rules.

Joe McKendrick capitalizing on service-oriented architecture, but interesting articles nonetheless.

Oddly, this may be one of the best definitions of "rule-base system". It's when you do ....

Conventionally, rule-based systems are defined as or are closely associated with expert systems. But the usually ever-reliable Wikipedia mentions them only in the context of expert systems and that only in passing.  THe central definition of expert system is:

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 ):

Why the SOA Reference Architecture ?

The OASIS SOA Reference Architecture is one of the best introductions to SOA, providing a complete, consistent and largely non-technical set of concepts and definitions for SOA technology. It may be the easiest way to understand SOA without digging through volumes of arcane technical standards and XML specifications.

The OMG ( Object Management Group ) is a consortium that sets standards for object-oriented systems and and model-based architectures.

Perhaps the most interesting page from a standards standpoint is the SOA Glossary.

The SOA glossary, provided by the SOA Community of Practice, contains general definitions of SOA terms as well as links to common definitions in industry and standards organizations such as OMG, Oasis, Open Group and W3C.

According to the Google Base site ( beta ), it is:

... a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we'll make searchable on Google (if your content isn't online yet, we'll put it there). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. In fact, based on your items' relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Google Product Search, Google Maps and even our main Google web search.

Key features:

From their SEKT in a Nutshell brochure:

SEKT is a European research and development project launched in January 2004 with a lifetime of three years ...

... SEKT is developing automated techniques for extracting meaning from the Web. By generating structured descriptions of Web pages (using ontologies) SEKT is making those pages machine-processable and enabling computers to analyse information more intelligently.