% talk abstract for invited talk at IBM Almaden Jan. 30 2006 % hosted by Savitha Srinavasan and Jim Spohrer Rule-based Semantic Services: Leveraging Knowledge Representation to Automate Business Processes Benjamin Grosof Assistant Professor of Information Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management Co-Founder, RuleML Initiative Co-Editor, Semantic Web Services Initiative http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof Abstract: The use of knowledge-based techniques for e-services over the web has recently grown rapidly as a commercial area, focused largely on unstructured forms of knowledge, notably text. A new wave of knowledge-based technology focused on interoperable structured forms of knowledge, notably rules in combination with databases and ontologies, is exploding as a research and standardization area. What does this exciting new wave of rule-based semantic technology mean for automating services? This presentation will focus on the key concepts, techniques, emerging business applications, and business value analysis for rule-based semantic services -- much of which we have pioneered. We overview our foundational work in semantic rules and their use for semantic services. This includes: 1. the dominant approach to standardizing interoperable rules in W3C and OMG, based on XML declarative logic programs (LP) cf. RuleML; 2. core knowledge representation theory and techniques, notably extensions of LP for procedural attachments for actions and queries, prioritized conflict handling and robust merging, and incorporation of ontologies (Production Logic Programs) -- embodied in the leading open source platform/toolkit (SweetRules); 3. the influential Semantic Web Services Framework design approach; and 4. application-specific techniques and prototypes in e-commerce (e.g., contracts, advertising, procurement, problem handling), information integration/mediation (e.g., financial and travel), and authorization/trust (e.g., security and confidentiality). We roadmap big future opportunities and challenges for semantic services engineering and business process automation overall, including combination with other knowledge-based techniques for uncertainty, text and data mining, annotation, process modeling, and process composition. Bio: at http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof/#Bio Additional Details (Abstract, continued): Rule-based semantic services techniques promise much deeper and cheaper business process automation and communication, enabling much expanded e-services, both intra- and inter- enterprise. Semantic rules are especially good for representing and automating many kinds of policy-flavor knowledge and a variety of services tasks. Their high level of conceptual abstraction facilitates specification and understanding by non-programmers. Generalizing database views and queries, semantic rules are the most expressively powerful form of structured knowledge that is practical for large scale deployment on the web, and offer much greater knowledge reuse. They enable loose-coupled integration of heterogeneous rule-based applications/services -- both forward-chaining/event-driven and backward-chaining/query-driven -- and distributed creation of large knowledge bases. ("Semantic" means having declarative interoperability in the sense of knowledge representation and database theory, independent of implementation/control-algorithm.) Work supported in part by a DARPA Agent Markup Language program award and the Center for eBusiness @ MIT Vision Fund.