Sunday, November 16, 2008

ORF 2009 - Call for White Papers

Greetings:

We're starting early this year in our call for papers.  For ORF 2009, regardless of the location and timing, because of the demand from the final session on ORF 2008, we think that it would be best to have ALL of the papers (except for "possibly" a tutorial session prior to ORF 2009) be on the APPLICATION OF RULEBASED SYSTEMS IN BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY.  

Here is the difference between ORF 2008 and anything that BR Forum is doing:  This entire conference will focus on the following:
  • Real World Business or Industry Application
  1. Supply Chain Management
  2. Forecasting and Quantitative Analysis
  3. Insurance
  4. Banking and Mortages
  5. Processing Plant Operations
  6. Geology
  7. Medicine
  8. Science (Chemistry, Physics, Math, etc)
  9. Engineering (EE, ME, CE, etc.)
  • What was needed
  • What was the approach
  • What was the architecture
  • Was the problem solved completely
  • Show the architecture of the rules
  • Examples of rules (yes, screen shots are permissible)
  • Neural Network Solutions to problems are encouraged
  • Solutions should have contained at least 200 rules but there is no maximum
While the main part or most of the rules "might" be business confidential and not displayed, that's OK so long as the attendees are shown the rules that had the most effect on the outcome.   What we do NOT want are the following:
  • NO Product Demonstrations per se
  • NO Toy example systems
  • And nothing to do with a Pet Store UNLESS it was a real Pet Store!  :-)
So, any comments?  This was what most of the attendees at ORF 2008 seemed to want.  I'll probably put out an email later pointing everyone to this blog since most are not using the RSS feed to keep themselves updated.  (We don't have an ORF blog right now but maybe next month.)

SDG
jco

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jim,

Sounds similar to the format of the presentation I gave with Keith for ORF2008. Do you confirm? Anything you'd like to see different?

Dan

James Owen said...

Daniel:

Not really a problem and this was directed more toward the BRF papers and the Vendor Demos that were presented last time. I think that you were there for the last session where the attendees said that they wanted more "How To" papers.

I think that most of them can handle the syntax and they understand their business side, but they aren't sure about how to do something like this from start to finish. So, ORF 2009 will be mostly a chance for guys to stand up and say, "This is WHAT we did and this is HOW we did it and here is what the UML looks like and here is what the rule ARCHITECTURE looks like and here are the RULES."

All that without disclosing company secrets. :-)

SDG

jcmorris said...

James,
For godsakes let's make sure that people don’t refer to ORF as a "business rules" conference as I've seen it done in various places recently. Rolando has a bad habit of this! :-) We have to keep hammering that point. There is much much more to using rules and rule engines just than "business rules". :-)

I welcome anyone who would like to present on how (s)he has applied rule engine technology to something *other* than grinding through truth tables.

Some ideas:

· Using Fuzzy Rules in a rule engine or building expert systems with fuzzy rules.
· Using a rule engine to power an agent.
· Using rules to power blackboard systems.
· Using rules to adapt cases in a case-based expert system.
· Using rule engines to reason about semantically tagged metadata such as in an OWL ontology.
· Using a rule engine to build intelligent training and tutorial systems.
· Using rule engines to build decision support and problem-solving systems (i.e., that need to control selection and application of complex algorithms).

... and many many more.

Perhaps we can have a prize for the Best Paper/Presentation as judged by a panel of the audience or other experts as they do at other conferences.

The winner should have:
· Clearly defined the problem to be solved in relation to his/her market or domain.
· Clearly defined the value proposition to the approach he/she decided to use.
· Clearly articulated his/her approach to uniquely solving this problem by using a rule engine and/or rule-based technology.
· Clearly stated the results and implications of this project.
· Clearly stated the lessons-learned, recommendations, and thoughts for future work.
· Provided a working bibliography of any necessary references (IEEE format is preferred).

Dan? Mark? Rolando? Greg? What do you think???
Cheers,

- Jason Morris

Anonymous said...

James,

FYI: I have not worked for TIBCO for over a year.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/timbass

Regards, Tim