- #ORF09 An introduction to the RETE algorithm
- #ORF09 Playing With the Rules Presentation
- #ORF09 Rule Patterns and Features Presentation
- #ORF09 Early Alert System Presentation
- #ORF09 Engineer’s perspective on Rule Technology Keynote
- #ORF09 Enterprise Architecture Presentation
- #ORF09 Enterprise Architecture Presentation Part II
- #ORF09 Model Driven Approach for BRMS Presentation
- #ORF09 Production Rule Systems
- #ORF09 Graph Based Knowledge Bases and Rules Presentation
- #ORF09 Truth versus Useful Lies Presentation
- #ORF09 Automated Verification of rules Presentation
- #ORF09 Agile Business Rule Development Presentation
- #ORF09 Rule Classification First Presentation
- #ORF09 Rule Violation and Over-Constrained Problems Presentation
- #ORF09 Generating Rules from UML presentation
- #ORF09 What’s Different about Rules in CEP Presentation
- #ORF09 Measuring your Rules’ KPI Presentation
- #ORF09 Designing a System of Rule Based Agents Presentation
- #ORF09 Extending General Purpose Engines Presentation
- #ORF09 Programming Rules using a spreadsheet interface
- #ORF09 Practical and Modern RBE Presentation
- #ORF09 Temporal Reasoning Presentation
- #ORF09 Business Rules in the Cloud Presentation
- #ORF09 October Rules Fest Think Tank
- #ORF09 October Rules Fest Think Tank – Part II
- #ORF09 CLIPS implementation of RETE Presentation
- #ORF09 Complex Event Processing Models Presentation
- #ORF09 Distributed Programming with Agents Presentation
- #ORF09 making Parallelism Available to Rule Developers Presentation
Thomas Cooper is the keynote speaker for the conference. He wrote the original book on OPS5 way back when and has continued to work in the field since.
Some of his speech was some kind of review of what he live from an evolution perspective.
In the late 70’s and early 80’s he worked at Digital (DEC) and they were working on first generation knowledge systems (R1, OPS4, OPS5). He worked on XSEL which was basically an interface for sales people to select functionality instead of part numbers to build Vax Systems.
When they started to try building teams, they realized the best rule writers were not programmers. They needed people that could handle complexity and hired people other than programmers. Programmers had a tendency to write very cumbersome code.
They also worked on developing a Monopoly game that was built in OPS5 including random phrases that would show “personality” and they attached it to a speech synthesizer and gave them different voices. Very cool stuff for that era if you think about it.
He then went on to challenges of building very large expert systems that keep evolving with large number of rules. The maintenance became a problem. New people would get 3 months of training and then 9 months of contributing. There was a 40-50% rule change rate per year. The number of parts the system needed to handle, number of rules all variables that started making this become a maintenance and a performance nightmare.
They started working on technology improvements, worked on standards and conventions (rules, rule groups, rule naming, formatting, etc.). They had to be careful to to start rebuilding a procedural language. All of the things we assume will be present in today’s systems were just not there back then and they had to build all of the functionality themselves.
Here are some of the things they were telling new people to learn to work on their systems:
- Think in terms of rules and state
- Strive for rule independence
- user refraction
- use general and special case rules
- Etc.
Today, he was hoping that the rule technology would have evolved. It has but not as much as he was hoping for. Design Patterns are lacking in the industry. Temporal models are not as evolved as he would like (CEP and Effective Dated Domain Models).
Very interesting keynote that kind of gives us a glimpse of how things were when the pioneers in the industry started.
Tags: Business Rules, Conferences, ORF09