W3C is holding a Workshop on Rule Languages for Interoperability to
bring together rule system vendors, rule users with a need for
interoperability, and others to work toward developing a standard rule
language for the Web.

  When:  27-28 April 2005
  Where: Washington, D.C., USA

The full Call for Participation is available at:

     http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/cfp

The event is being organized by the W3C Semantic Web Activity.  The
workshop will be chaired by Christian de Sainte Marie (csma@ilog.fr,
ILOG), Said Tabet (stabet@comcast.net, The RuleML Initiative), and
Sandro Hawke (sandro@w3.org, W3C).

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Important Information
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Other important dates and deadlines for this workshop are:

   18 March 2005: Position papers due
   1  April 2005: Agenda available
   15 April 2005: Registration closes

Please note that:

  - There will be a limit of 75 participants.
  - Attendance is open to everyone, but each organization or
    individual wishing to participate must submit a position paper.
  - To ensure maximum diversity among participants, the number of
    participants per organization may be limited in the event the
    overall participation limit is reached.
  - There is no registration fee.

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Workshop Overview
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   Rule languages and rule systems are widely used in applications
   ranging from database integration, service provisioning, and
   business process management to loan underwriting, privacy policies
   and Web services composition. General purpose rule languages remain
   relatively unstandardized, however, and rule systems from different
   suppliers are rarely interoperable.

   Meanwhile, the Web has achieved remarkable success in allowing
   documents to be shared and linked throughout the world. More
   recently, Semantic Web languages like RDF and OWL are beginning to
   support data/knowledge sharing on the same scale and with
   considerable flexibility. Having a language for sharing rules is
   often seen as the next step in promoting data exchange on the Web.

   This workshop, held by W3C with support from DARPA and hosted by
   ILOG, is intended to gather various participants and inputs needed
   to see how a standard rule framework might be developed, informed
   by Web Architecture and useful for addressing real user challenges.