New standards open up BRMS

In the early days of rules-based systems, there were only a few vendors, most of which used some variation of a syntax developed by the OPS (Official Production System) programmers at Carnegie-Mellon University. Each vendor put its own spin on the language, effectively locking in customers. What the industry needed and still needs is a way to enter rules in an engine-neutral format.

Several communities are proposing standards that will eventually enable business analysts to use a single, portable rules syntax and employ different rules engines for different projects. The leading proposed standard for achieving this is BRML (Business Rules Markup Language), an XML-based format for expressing rules in engine-neutral fashion.

The other major XML standard being proposed is DAML (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Agent Markup Language). The main goal of DAML is to enable developers to tag pages of information so that they can be read by BRMS products, which can then parse the information and use it in a rules-based context.

Evidence that business rules represent a worldwide effort can be seen in the RuleML (Rule Markup Language). Originating at the Sixth Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in August 2000, RuleML is an attempt to support forward-chaining (top-down) and backward-chaining (bottom-up) approaches to building rules. RuleML was proposed as an XML standard but has been extended to Java-based rules engines.

FpML (Financial products Markup Language) intends to be the XML standard for swaps, derivatives, and structured products, and the Business Products Management Initiative  proposes to standardize management of business processes that span multiple applications, corporate departments, and business partners.

Finally, the real heavyweight to enter the standards arena is Sun Microsystems, which has introduced JSR (Java Specification Request) 94 and has assigned it a place in Sun’s JDK. At this point, the javax.rule API is fairly limited to a few classes with several interfaces and exception classes, but that, after all, is how Java itself started. For Java-based rules engines, JSR 94 might prove to be the glue that binds together engine-neutral rules development.