I am going to brush off my old marketing hat today to tell you about ILOG Dialog 08, our annual user conference. There’s a great line-up of speakers, with Gartner’s Daryl Plummer leading the BRMS track. The other tracks include Optimization, Visualization, Supply Chain and a general track. The session list includes talks by industry luminaries as well as real-world experience reports from ILOG customers. Dialog 08 is a great opportunity to hear from your industry peers, and to explore how BRMS, Optimization, Visualization or Supply Chain Management can help you “change the rules of your business”.

Like you, I’m hoping I can convince my boss to give me a week away from the coal-face, and that I will see you in sunny Palm Springs, CA!

Christian de Sainte Marie caught me in the hallway yesterday and reminded me that Production Rule Representation (PRR) has reached the important Beta 1 milestone within the Object Management Group’s standardization process. The PRR group is soliciting comments on the specification. Please send comments before the end of the year if you’d like them to taken into account for the group’s presentation to the Finalization Task Force. You can download the specification from the OMG website.

As a recap, here is the introduction to the PRR specification:

The Production Rule Representation (PRR) fulfills a number of requirements related to business rules, software systems,
OMG standards, and other rule standards.

• It provides a standard production rule representation that is compatible with rule engine vendors’ definitions of
  production rules. It can therefore be used for interchange of business rules amongst rule modeling tools (and other
  tools that support rule modeling as a function of some other task).
• It provides a standard production rule representation that is readily mappable to business rules, as defined by business
  rule management tool vendors.
• It provides a standard production rule definition that supports and encourages system vendors to support production
  rule execution.
• It provides an OMG MDA PIM model with a high probability of support at the PSM level from the contributing rule
  engine vendors and others, and can be included to add production rule capabilities to other OMG metamodels.
• It provides examples of how the OMG UML can be used to support production rules in a standardized and useful way.
• It provides a standard production rule representation that can be used as the basis for other efforts such as the W3C
  Rule Interchange Format and a production rule version of RuleML.

My colleagues Bruno Berstel and Philippe Bonnard recently attended Reasoning Web 2007 and co-presented “Reactive Rules on the Web” with François Bry, Michael Eckert and Paula-Lavinia Patrânjan. You can purchase the conference materials from SpringerLink.

If you create an account at REASE you can also download the slides.