The MS Rules Framework was a spirited attempt by MS to create a wide-ranging environment that could integrate rules held in different forms in different repositories, mange the deployment of rule sets out across an enterprise environment and even target a range of different rules engines.
The Center for Multisource Information Fusion (CMIF) is a research center based at the University at Buffalo and at a non-profit Western New York research center called CUBRC Inc.. Information fusion allows users to assess complex situations more accurately by combining effectively the core evidence in the massive, diverse and sometimes conflicting data received from multiple sources. CUBRC/UB's partners in the center are the Rochester Institute of Technology, which has expertise in image analysis and visualization, and Pennsylvania State University, which also has a long history in information fusion research focused on the human and cognitive aspects.
Every organization has 4 other domains in which BPM projects are executed; Corporate Performance Management (CPM), IT architecture Management (ITAM) and Governance Risks and Compliance (GRC), Core Application Framework (CAF/SAP). The Enterprise BPM framework can be also used in all these domains, which results in 5 maturity models including the ERP/SAP maturity model (see figure below).
I believe that the general consensus among those who study this kind of thing, is that any decision made wholly by a computer is an operational decision, even if it affects the behavior/tasks of many people or sub-components. Online decisions, being a subset of automated decisions, would then be operational in nature.
The development of the Internet in recent years has made it possible and useful to access many different information systems anywhere in the world to obtain information. While there is much research on the integration of heterogeneous information systems, most commercial systems stop short of the actual integration of available data. Data fusion is the process of fusing multiple records representing the same real-world object into a single, consistent, and clean representation.
The “big elephant in the room” in the ongoing CEP dialog is that most of the current (CEP) software on the market is not capable of machine learning and statistical analysis of dynamic real-time situations. Software vendors have been promoting and selling business process automation solutions and calling this approach “CEP” when, in fact, nothing is new. There is certainly no “technology leap” in these systems, as sold today.
Activity diagrams are a loosely defined diagram technique for showing workflows of stepwise activities and actions, with support for choice, iteration and concurrency.[1] In the Unified Modeling Language, activity diagrams can be used to describe the business and operational step-by-step workflows of components in a system. An activity diagram shows the overall flow of control.
A state diagram is a type of diagram used in computer science and related fields to describe the behavior of systems. State diagrams require that the system described is composed of a finite number of states; sometimes, this is indeed the case, while at other times this is a reasonable abstraction. There are many forms of state diagrams, which differ slightly and have different semantics.
What is a business rule? What is the business rule approach?
In this Second Edition of his popular handbook, first published in 1998, Mr. Ross brings you up-to-date on these and related questions.
Compliance. Requirements. Adaptability. Knowledge.
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Semantics in Business Systems begins with a description of what semantics are and how they affect business systems. It examines four main aspects of the application of semantics to systems, specifically: How do we infer meaning from unstructured information, how do application systems make meaning as they operate, how do practitioners uncover meaning in business settings, and how do we understand and communicate what we have deduced? This book illustrates how this applies to the future of application system development, especially how it informs and affects Web services and business rule- based approaches, and how semantics will play out with XML and the semantic Web. The book also contains a quick reference guide to related terms and technologies. It is part of Morgan Kaufmann's series of Savvy Manager's Guides.
Stateful means the computer or program keeps track of the state of interaction, usually by setting values in a storage field designated for that purpose. Stateless means there is no record of previous interactions and each interaction request has to be handled based entirely on information that comes with it.
Most BREs today are deployed as “decision services”, and are used in “stateless” transactions to make “decisions” as a part of a business process. A CEP application is instead processing multiple event streams and sources over time, which requires a “stateful” rule service optimized for long running. This is an important distinction, as a stateful BRE for long-running processes needs to have failover support - the ability to cache its working memory for application restarting or distribution. And of course long-running processes need to be very particular over issues like memory handling - no memory leaks allowed!