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.