% talk abstract for invited talk of Dec. 2005 presented at (alphabetically): % Google Labs (Dec. 12), IBM Almaden (Dec. 13), and Oracle (Dec. 7). Semantic Rules for Policies and Services on the Web: Techniques, Business Applications, and Standards Benjamin Grosof Asst. Professor, MIT Sloan Information Technologies group Co-Founder, RuleML Initiative bgrosof@mit.edu http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof Bio at http://ebusiness.mit.edu/bgrosof/#Bio Abstract: Semantic rules on the web is exploding as a research and standardization area. W3C has just formed a new full-blown standards Working Group, and OMG formed one last year. What is all the excitement about, and what does this new wave of rules technology mean for business? This presentation will focus on the key concepts, techniques, emerging business applications, and business value analysis -- much of which we have pioneered. Semantic rules, in combination with databases and ontologies, are especially good for representing and automating many kinds of policy-flavor knowledge and a variety of services tasks, e.g., in contracting, monitoring, authorization/trust (security, privacy, access control), and information mediation/integration. ("Semantic" means having declarative interoperability in the sense of knowledge representation and database theory, independent of implementation/control-algorithm.) Overall, semantic rules are a key part of the emerging new generation web, based on XML and knowledge-based techniques, that promises much deeper and cheaper business process automation and communication, enabling much expanded e-services, both intra- and inter- enterprise. 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. Semantics, based on declarative logic programs knowledge representation, enables 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. Additional Details (Abstract, continued): Our foundational work includes: - the dominant approach to standardizing interoperability in W3C and OMG (including declarative logic programs cf. RuleML); - core theory and techniques for . prioritized merging/integration of heterogeneous rules and databases (including Situated Courteous Logic Programs), . interoperating forward-chaining production rules (i.e., condition-action rules) with backward-chaining RDBMS and Prolog systems (including Production Logic Programs), and . integrating rules with ontologies (including Description Logic Programs for integrating database-schemas and OWL/RDF, and courteous inheritance for integrating object-oriented code frameworks/taxonomies); - the leading open source platform/toolkit (SweetRules); and - application scenarios and approaches in e-contracting (including SweetDeal), authorization/trust, financial information, business process automation (including MIT Process Handbook), and web services overall (including Semantic Web Services Framework). Work supported in part by a DARPA Agent Markup Language program award and the Center for eBusiness @ MIT Vision Fund.