% abstract for EBRC-2007 keynote 
% by Benjamin Grosof
% created 2/18/07


The New Rules of Business:  
Semantic Web as Disruptive Innovation

Benjamin Grosof, MIT 

This presentation roadmaps the near future of semantic/declarative/web
business rules technology and standards, and its disruptive innovation
implications for industry structure and profitability.  

We begin by surveying highlights from the recent rapid advances in
fundamental capabilities for interoperability, expressive features,
and exploitation of web markup.  These include several important
extensions of logic programs knowledge representation, powerful new
techniques for translating and sharing rules between different rule
systems, and approaches that significantly simplify rule authoring and
lifecycle management.  We discuss several major relevant industry
standards efforts including RuleML, W3C RIF, OMG PRR and SBVR, and
JSR-94.  We delineate several emerging wide sectors of applications
and markets for business rules.  We then give a strategic analysis of the
resulting near future impact of all these developments on the business
rules industry.  This includes a pattern of disruptive innovation
affecting software vendors, customers, and providers of system
integration and consulting services.  We analyze the prospective
radical changes in profitability, industry structure, and market
dynamics.