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<div class="head">
<h1><em>- Call For Participation -</em></h1>

<h1>W3C Workshop on<br/>Rule Languages<br/>for Interoperability</h1>

<h3>27-28 April 2005 &mdash; Washington, D.C., USA</h3>

<div class="abstract">

<p>Summary: Rule languages and rule systems are widely used in
applications ranging from database integration, service provisioning,
and business process management to loan underwriting, privacy policies
and Web services composition.  General purpose rule languages remain
relatively unstandardized, however, and rule systems from different
suppliers are rarely interoperable.
</p>

<p>Meanwhile, the Web has achieved remarkable success in allowing
documents to be shared and linked throughout the world.  More
recently, <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/">Semantic Web</a>
languages like <a href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/">RDF</a> and <a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/">OWL</a> are beginning to
support data/knowledge sharing on the same scale and with considerable
flexibility.  Having a language for sharing rules is often seen as the
next step in promoting data exchange on the Web.</p>

<p>This workshop, held by W3C with support from <a
href="http://www.daml.org/">DARPA</a> and hosted by <a
href="http://ilog.com/">ILOG</a>, is intended to gather various
participants and inputs needed to see how a standard rule framework
might be developed, informed by <a
href="http://www.w3c.org/TR/webarch/">Web Architecture</a> and useful
for addressing real user challenges.</p>

</div>

<h4>See <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws">workshop
site</a> for news and repository of contributed materials</h4>


</div>

<div class="map">

<h2>Contents</h2>

<ul>
  <li><a href="#Purpose">Purpose</a>
  <ul>
  <li><a href="#Back">Background</a></li>
  <li><a href="#Goal">Workshop Goals</a></li>
  <li><a href="#Deliverables">Deliverables</a></li>
  <li><a href="#Scope">Scope</a></li>
  </ul>
  </li>

  <li><a href="#Participation">Participation</a>

  <ul>
  <li><a href="#Expected">Expected Audience</a></li>
  <li><a href="#Registration">Requirements for Participation</a></li>
  <li><a href="#Position">Position Papers</a></li>
  </ul>
  </li>

  <li><a href="#Organization">Organization</a>
  <ul>
  <li><a href="#Prog_chair">Program Committee</a></li>
  <li><a href="#Venue">Venue</a></li>
  <li><a href="#Dates">Important Dates</a></li>
  </ul></li>

</ul>
</div>


<h2><a id="Purpose">Purpose</a></h2>

<h3><a id="Back">Background</a></h3>

<h4>Rules everywhere</h4>

<p>Rules are everywhere. They are found in many domains, disciplines, and
industries. Business policies, laws and regulations, guidelines and
best practices, definitions and axioms, database schema translations,
workflow branching and technical constraints, all require a
declarative and modular approach to their implementation. There is a
thriving commercial market in several families of rule technologies,
including production rules, event-condition-action rules, Prolog,
relational database systems, and others. However, practical
interoperability between these systems, especially across the
different families, is currently quite limited.</p>

<p>Rules are a key element of the Semantic Web vision, allowing
integration, derivation, and transformation of data from multiple
sources in a distributed, transparent, and scalable manner.  Rules can
themselves be treated as data, published on the web, and when <a
href="http://www.w3c.org/TR/webarch/#uri-benefits">URIs</a> (or <a
href="http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/qnameids.html">QNames</a>) are
used as symbol-constants in a rule language, they can form useful
links between knowledge bases. In a Web services environment, rules
offer the opportunity to enable the automation of the enforcement and
composition of policies governing the delivery of information, the
access to services, or the execution of processes.</p>

<p>Rules have advantages of flexibility and manageability. In
addition, the declarative nature of rules gives them a special appeal
as a programmatic and knowledge representation device in a distributed
and Web-based environment, where they can be owned, specified and managed
in one place, and applied in many other places. This requires,
however, a standard way to represent rules unambiguously for
publication and interchange purposes.</p>


<h4>Different rules and a common foundation</h4>

<p>Rules come in a variety of forms for different uses and
applications.  Business rules, decision tables, and decision trees are
used to automate the enforcement of business policies and regulations.
Logical formulas, constraints, ontologies, association and
transformation rules are used for inferencing in information retrieval
and information integration, including databases, and metadata
repositories (e.g.  <a href="http://www.dublincore.org/">Dublin Core
Initiative</a>), or in analytical, forecasting and/or optimization
applications.</p>

<p>Rules, however, trace their roots back to formal logic. There,
semantics can be represented via a logical model theory and
inference can be based on logical proof theory. The most
important de facto semantic standard is first order predicate
calculus, unchanged for nearly a hundred years.  In the last three
decades, declarative logic programs have emerged as a complement to
first order logic, and provided the foundation for the semantics of
relational databases and many rule languages. Algorithmic techniques
and theory for formal logic have been extended to enable, and
semantically treat: procedural attachments for built-ins, tests, and
actions; and non-monotonicity for negation-as-failure, defaults,
inheritance, prioritization, updating, revision, and conflict
handling.
</p>

<h4>Candidate Languages and related work
</h4>

<p>To be effective, practical, and deployable, a Web standard on rules
needs to focus on the requirements of end users and the needs of rule
technology providers. The goal of being able to transfer rulebases /
knowledge bases, or simply to process them with different software,
has helped motivate several important standardization or
standards-proposing efforts including <a
href="http://www.ruleml.org/">RuleML</a> and <a
href="http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/03/Comment">SWRL</a>, <a
href="http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer.html">n3</a>, <a
href="http://www.w3.org/RDF/Metalog/">Metalog</a>, <a
href="http://logic.stanford.edu/kif/kif.html">KIF</a> and <a
href="http://philebus.tamu.edu/cl/">ISO Common Logic</a>, <a
href="http://pauillac.inria.fr/~deransar/prolog/docs.html">ISO
Prolog</a>, and others.  Some of those have been aimed at more or less
specialized purposes, e.g., in the domains of Web Service policies (<a
href="http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2003-06-04-a.html">WS-Policy</a>,
WSPL, <a href="http://policy.ruleml.org/">Policy RuleML</a>, <a
href="http://www.daml.org/services/swsl/">SWSL</a>, <a
href="http://www.wsmo.org/wsml/">WSML</a>), access control and
authorization (<a
href="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xacml">XACML</a>,
<a
href="http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/enterprise-privacy/epal/">EPAL</a>,
<a href="http://www.w3.org/P3P/">P3P</a>/<a
href="http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P-preferences/">APPEL</a>), Business
Rules (<a href="http://xml.coverpages.org/brml.html">BRML</a>, <a
href="http://xml.coverpages.org/srml.html">SRML</a>), and other areas
as well. Related standardization efforts have also started with
respect to rule modeling (OMG's Business Semantics for Business Rules
RFP and Production Rules Representation RFP) and rulebase execution
(<a href="http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=94">JSR 94 - Java API
for Rules Engine</a>).
</p>

<h3><a id="Goal">Workshop Goals</a></h3>

<p>This workshop is a step along the path to establishing a standard
language framework to support rule system interoperation on the Web.
It aims at gathering vendors, technologists,
application developers and users to discuss and provide recommendations
to the W3C regarding what
is the best approach to the specification of a standard or family of
standards for the public representation and exchange of rules on the
Web, in terms of avoiding redundant efforts, of optimizing the
potential for wide adoption, and of promoting consistency and
interoperability between different applications or layers, while
preserving their specific requirements.
</p>

<p>The specific goals for this workshop are:</p>

<ol>

  <li>Gather and refine use cases and requirements for a
  framework;</li>

  <li>Gather information about available technologies and relevant
  areas of practice and research;</li>

  <li>Help establish a common ground for this work as well as a
  community of possible participants;</li>

  <li>Understand priorities and time frames and gather information to
  establish a strategy and a calendar;</li>

  <li>Help organizations and individuals learn enough about this work
  to determine their level of commitment going forward.</li>

</ol>


<h3><a id="Deliverables">Deliverables</a></h3>

<p>The workshop is expected to result in the following deliverables:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Use Cases (ideally with Test Cases) and Potential Requirements</li>
  <li>Candidate Technologies</li>
  <li>Workshop position papers</li>
  <li>Workshop presentations</li>
  <li>Workshop minutes</li>
  <li>Recommendations regarding future work</li>
</ul>

<p>These will be published on the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws">workshop home page</a>.</p>


<h3><a id="Scope">Scope of the Workshop</a></h3>

<p>The scope of this workshop is restricted in order to make the best
use of participants' time.  In general, discussion at the workshop and
in the position papers should stay focused on the workshop goals and
deliverables.</p>

<p>In scope:</p>
<ul>
<li>Collecting use cases and articulating requirements</li>
<li>Analyses of the rules market and user base</li>
<li>Comparisons across languages and systems, including both widely deployed and
research systems</li>
<li>Discussing the scope of a W3C Working Group in this area</li>
<li>Test cases which clarify use cases and demonstrate key
differences between candidate technologies</li>
</ul>

<p>Out of scope:</p>
<ul>

<li>Detailed technical discussion or presentation of new results,
beyond what is necessary to resolve issues concerning the main group
of participants.  This is not an academic workshop or conference.</li>

<li>Significantly revisiting existing W3C Recommendations</li>

<li>Making decisions.  While people can discuss the desirability or
practicality of features and observe "straw poll" consensus, the lack
of time or structure for deliberation rules out formal decision
making.</li><li>To avoid a common time sink, we ask that people avoid trying to define
the term "rule".  An impulse to label something as "not being about
rules" or circumscribe the territory can often be reframed as asking
more details about a use case.</li>


</ul>

<h2><a id="Participation">Participation</a></h2>

<h3><a id="Expected">Expected Audience</a></h3>

<p>We expect several communities to contribute to the workshop:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Rule users, especially those with a need for system interoperability</li>
  <li>Rule systems providers (commercial or non commercial)</li>
  <li> Representatives of and participants in related standards efforts</li>
  <li>Technical experts</li>
</ul>

<h3>Requirements for
Participation</h3>
<ul>
  <li><b>Position papers are required</b> to participate in this workshop. Each organization or individual wishing to participate must submit a
    <a href="#Position">position paper</a>
no later than 18 March. Participation is pending acceptance of the
position paper by the program committee. (Government employees who
wish to participate but are     unable to submit position papers should
contact the workshop chairs.)</li>
<li>To ensure maximum interaction among participants, the number of participants will be limited. To ensure maximum diversity, the number of participants per organization will be
    limited in the event the overall participation limit is reached</li><li>There will be no participation fee.</li>
  <li>W3C membership is not required</li>
  <li>Workshop sessions and documents will be in English</li>
  <li><a id="Registration" name="Registration">
Instructions for how to register will be sent to submitters of
  accepted position papers.</a></li>
</ul>

<h3><a id="Position">Position Papers</a></h3>

<p>Position papers are the basis for the discussion at the
workshop. These papers will also be made available to the public from
the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws">workshop
site</a>.</p>

<h4>Topics</h4>

<p>Position papers discussing applications are expected to focus on
the requirements for the public representation and interchange of
rules.  Position papers discussing interchange formats are expected to
focus on the requirements and types of application covered by the
proposal.  Position papers discussing specifications including a rule
interchange format are expected to focus on that aspect and on how
they could link to/import rules represented in other existing or
emerging formats (or why they cannot). Position papers discussing
general issues regarding rules interchange and rule systems
interoperability are expected to focus on how relevant existing
standards or proposal or parts of an approach can be reused, evolved,
extended; on principles and architecture; on related efforts in other
communities (OMG, JCP, ISO, RuleML, SWSI, WSMO, etc).</p>


<h4>Format</h4>

<p>All papers should be 1 to 5 pages, although they may link to longer
versions or appendixes. Papers should explain the participant's interest
in the workshop, explain their position with respect to a standard for
publishing and interchanging rules on the Web and include concrete
examples of the kind of rules they are interested in.</p>

<p>Accepted position papers will be published on the public Web pages
of the workshop.  Submitting a position paper comprises a default
recognition of these terms for publication. Allowed formats are
(valid) HTML/XHTML, PDF, or plain text.  Papers in any other formats
(including invalid HTML/XHTML) will be returned with a request for
correct formatting. Good examples of position papers can be seen in
the <a href="/TandS/QL/QL98/pp.html">QL'98 workshop</a>.</p>

<p>The Program Committee may ask the authors of particularly salient
position papers to explicitly present their position at the workshop
to foster discussion. Presenters will be asked to make the slides of
the presentation available on the <a
href="http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws">workshop home page</a> in
HTML, PDF, or plain text.</p>

<p>Position papers must be submitted via email to <a href="mailto:
team-rule-language-workshop-submit@w3.org">
team-rule-language-workshop-submit@w3.org</a> no later than 18 March
2005.  Early submissions are appreciated.</p>

<h2><a id="Organization">Workshop Organization</a></h2>

<h3>Workshop Chairs</h3>

<ul>
<li>Sandro Hawke (W3C)</li>
<li>Christian de Sainte Marie (ILOG)</li>
<li>Said Tabet (The RuleML Initiative)</li>
</ul>

<h3><a id="Prog_chair">Program Committee</a></h3>

<p>At this time, the program committee is still being assembled.  The
list so far:</p>

<ul>
<li>Harold Boley (NRC Canada, RuleML)</li>
<li>Dan Connolly (W3C)</li>
<li>Mike Dean (BBN, DAML)</li>
<li>Stefan Decker (DERI)</li>
<li>Benjamin Grosof (MIT Sloan, RuleML)</li>
<li>Pat Hayes (IHMC, Common Logic) </li>
<li>Jim Hendler (University of Maryland)</li>
<li>Ian Horrocks (University of Manchester)</li>
<li>Martin Nally (IBM)</li>
<li>Massimo Marchiori (University of Venice)</li>
<li>Deborah McGuinness (Stanford KSL)</li>
<li>Bob McWhirter (OpenXource, Drools)</li>
<li>Eric Miller (W3C)</li>
<li>Jon Pellant (Pegasystems)</li>
<li>Jos de Roo (Agfa)</li>
<li>Chris Swan (Credit Suisse First Boston)</li>
<li>Paul Vincent (Fair Isaac)</li>
</ul>

<h3>Schedule</h3>

<p>The workshop program will run from 8:30 am to 6 pm on both days.</p>

<h3>Sponsors</h3>

<p><a href="http://www.ilog.com/">ILOG, S.A.</a> will host the
workshop, although not in their own facilities.</p>

<p>Significant funding for organizing this workshop was provided by
DARPA through the <a href="http://www.daml.org/">DAML</a> program.</p>

<h3><a id="Venue">Venue</a></h3>

<p>The workshop will be held in a conference facility (such as a
hotel) to be determined, in the Washington, D.C. area.  Details will
be included with acceptance notification.  See <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws">workshop site</a>.</p>


<h3><a id="Dates">Important Dates</a></h3>

<table summary="This table has four rows. The right column is the milestone for a date on the left.">
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th><strong>Date</strong></th>
      <th><strong>Event</strong></th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td class="date">15 February 2005</td>
      <td>Call For Participation issued</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="date">18 March 2005</td>
      <td>Deadline for <a href="#Position">position papers</a>.</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="date">1 April 2005</td>
      <td>Acceptance notification sent; Program released</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="date">15 April 2005</td>
      <td>Deadline for <a href="#Registration">registration</a></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="date">27 April 2005</td>
      <td>Workshop Begins (8:30 AM)</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td class="date">28 April 2005</td>
      <td>Workshop Ends (6 PM)</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>


<div class="author">
  <hr/>
  <a href="http://www.w3.org/People/Sandro">Sandro Hawke</a>,
  Said Tabet, Christian de Sainte Marie, with help from Benjamin Grosof
  <br/>
  $Id: cfp.html,v 1.105 2005/04/19 23:51:03 sandro Exp $
  <br/>
  <a href="http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/cfp">http://www.w3.org/2004/12/rules-ws/cfp</a>
</div>

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