Object Oriented Rule Engine

Last week I discussed the desire for a rule engine to allow object oriented domain logic to be browsed, searched, reviewed, and altered outside of an IDE.
http://jamesrdf.blogspot.com/2008/12/object-oriented-rule-engine.html

Earlier this year Zepheira, LLC needed an object oriented rule engine to enable different participants to manage continually changing rules. After developing a solution with Drools, it was observed that there were too many restrictions on the accessible data and the rules were getting too complicated to be effective with multiple participants each with different interests. Together we combined the modelling language - OWL (Web Ontology Language) - with the Object Oriented language Groovy to create a rule engine that was effective over large datasets and included many of the features of OOP including the ability to override selected rules for particular sub-domains within the model.

We developed the model using OWL and extended it by adding the ability to define message types (LHS rule declarations) and method bodies (RHS rule execution). By separating the two and associating every rule with a concept class, we were able to apply OOP features to the rules. The syntax we used can now be seen here:
http://www.openrdf.org/doc/elmo/1.4/user-guide/x457.html#AEN466

By developing Groovy domain logic in an RDF database we enabled many stakeholders access to review and alter the rules to facilitate their own what-if scenarios. It also made it possible to manage much more complex situations by utilizing the strong vocabulary of OWL to describe the concepts that could not easily be represented in a simple object model.

We achieved the flexibility we needed and reduced the complexity of the rules by using an object oriented rule engine. The rule engine has since been licensed under the BSD licence as part of the OpenRDF Elmo project at http://www.openrdf.org/

About Zepheira
Zepheira is a US-based professional services firm with expertise in semantic technologies and Enterprise Data Integration. For more information, visit: www.zepheira.com.