GaryH: developer at Oracle
... changing rules rather than application code
<sandro_> Gary: Benefits of standardizatin: lower cost and lower risk -> increase market
<sandro_> ... Vendors selling rules as content. A stretch right now, but a very nice idea.
GaryH: structured natural languages rather than logical language for rule syntax
... facts coming from Java, databases
... also XML documents; Oracle is experimenting with RDF
... invoking method on java object in rule condition
... function in rule which can be changed by business analyst
... generate knowledge using rules
... invoke web services as part of a rule
... to retrieve facts
... sometimes you need to control the order of rule firing
... forward chaining has good performance in most cases; backward chaining is good for specific queries
... standard rule language so that vendors can focus on the really difficult tasks
Christian: clarification question abotu backward chaining: is that really backward chaining or prioritization of the evaluation of the conditions.
GaryH: this is not the best example, but we do do backward chaining
AdrianW: contexts: you could have a subrule which checks a set of rules
... will take offline
BenG: what you do is a test (aka sensing)?
GaryH: yes
ThomasR: identity management and privacy and policy integration
... developed in the context of the PRIME project
... access control policy: if your age is not over 18, you cannot go forward
... exchanged information is sensitive
... user has privacy preference
... privacy rules are client-side and are symmetric to server-side access control policies
... client-side and server-side rules should agree
... constraints and ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules
<DanC_lap> slides for PRIME position
ThomasR: obligations transferred between parties
... address RDF triples, which represent data, from rules
... wall between obligation handling and firing of the rule, because of privacy
... constraints are exchanged; agreement is reached; agreement is ECA; needs to perform such actions as delete of data
Alan: what if constraints can't be met?
ThomasR: service provider has to make sure it does not engage in obligation 3rd party cannot fulfill
... audit trails are out of scope here
Phil: what about trust?
ThomasR: is out of scope of the use case; you can require auditing from service providers. You can put this in client-side requirements.
DaveGoldstein: government might want to look at transaction months later.
ThomasR: must be handled through compliance. Privacy preferences which contradict compliance can't be accepted
SuzetteS: application of rules in government in DoD
... systems need to be more dynamic; redeployment is very costly
... behaviour needs to be extracted from application; we need a standard for this
... reusing rules
... rules exchanged between coalition partners during engagement
... computer vision: using images to extract information
... multiple source inputs; integrating information
... need to express uncertainty at ontology level
... and at the rules level
<DanC_lap> "we found we had to separate events from reports of those events". yes!
SuzetteS: separate reports about objects from real objects; best practice under development
... not sure whether we need a difference between closed vs. open world, but this might be a requirement
PatH: about uncertainty: do you need probabilistic reasoning?
SuzetteS: we probably need several models for uncertainty; we need a standard way in DoD to express this.
Said: general discussion
Gary: business community wants to do non-declarative things; seems a descrepancy between candidate technologies and use cases.
GaryH: business analysts need to be in control; we take one step at a time in extracting rules from applications; we need close connections with java, web services, databases.
Suzette: DoD moves to network-centred architecture, i.e. SemWeb. Declarative methods are elegant. We need to rethink some things to integrate non-declarative things.
?: to Gary: wat about exception handling if a rule fails?
GaryH: exception is either handled in rule (is java-based) or by program which invokes the rule. Problem if part of the condition throws an exception; partly solved.