Abstract. The current standards for web service composition, e.g. BPEL. neither cater for dynamic service composition nor for dynamic business configuration. Our firm belief is that business processes can be built dynamically by composing web services in a model driven fashion where the design process is controlled and governed by a series of business rules. In this paper we examine the functional requirements of service composition and introduce a phased approach to the development of service compositions that spans abstract definition, scheduling, construction and execution. Subsequently, we analyze the information requirements for developing service compositions by identifying the basic elements in a web service composition and the business rules that are used to govern the development of service compositions. 1

Abstract. The emerging field of semantic web technologies promises new stimulus for Software Engineering research. However, since the underlying concepts of the semantic web have a long tradition in the knowledge engineering field, it is sometimes hard for software engineers to overlook the variety of ontology-enabled approaches to Software Engineering. In this paper we therefore present some examples of ontology applications throughout the Software Engineering lifecycle. We discuss the advantages of ontologies in each case and provide a framework for classifying the usage of ontologies in Software Engineering.

Abstract. One of the assumptions all the standards for web service composition (e.g. BPEL) make is that the business process is pre-defined. Obviously this assumption does not hold if business needs to accommodate changes in applications, technology, and organizational policies. We believe business processes can be dynamically built by composing web services if they are constructed based on and governed by business rules. In this paper we first analyze the basic elements in web service composition. Then we present a rule driven mechanism to govern and guide the process of service composition in terms of five broad composition phases spanning abstract definition, scheduling, construction, execution, and evolution to support on demand and on the fly business process generation. 1

Abstract. With web services emerging as a promising technology for supporting open and dynamic business processes, it is witnessed that standards for business process specification in the context of web services composition have been fast developed in recent years, e.g. WSFL, XLang, BPEL. However, none of the proposing specifications really address the issues of dynamic business process creation, e.g. a vast service space to search, a variety of services to compare and match, and different ways to construct business processes. One of the assumptions these standards make is that the business process is pre-defined. Obviously this assumption does not hold if the business needs to accommodate changes in applications, technology, and organizational policies. We believe business processes can be dynamically built by composing web services if they are constructed based on and governed by business rules. In this paper we analyze the basic elements in business modelling and how they relate to the web service composition process. As a result a rule driven mechanism is developed to govern and guide the process of service composition definition, scheduling, construction, execution, and evolution to support on demand and on the fly business process building. 1

Business rules provide an elegant solution to manage dynamic business logic by separating business knowledge from its implementation logic. The drawback of most existing business rule approaches is the lack of standardization and interoperability. The lack of service-orientation and remote accessibility of business rule engines makes it hard to use business rules in distributed environments. This paper contributes the design and implementation of VIDRE (Vienna Distributed Rules Engine), a service-oriented business rule engine based on RuleML. VIDRE enables enterprise applications to access business rules as easy as accessing a database, by exposing rules as Web services. VIDRE uses RuleML as an interlingua to represent facts, rules, and queries. One of the main contributions of the VIDRE approach is the ability to distribute rules and facts across various rule engines, therefore, enabling powerful ways of separating and executing business rules within intra- and interorganizational boundaries. 1.

Abstract. As their field of application has evolved and matured, the importance of verifying knowledge-based systems is now widely recognized. Nevertheless, some problems have remained. In this paper, we address the poor scalability to larger systems of the computation methods commonly applied to rule-chain anomaly checking. To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel anomaly checking method based on binary decision diagrams (BDDs), a technique emanating mainly from the hardware design community. In addition, we present empirical evidence of its computational efficiency, especially on rule bases with a deeper inference space. 1

Abstract. The quality of software engineering projects often suffers due to the large gap between the way stakeholders present their requirements and the way analysts capture and express those requirements. With this problem in mind the new method for business rules driven IS requirements specification has been developed. In this paper the architecture of the requirements repository, which is at the core of the proposed method, is presented. The repository model supports the storage and management of all components of the captured requirements, including functions, business decisions, data sources, conceptual data model elements, business rules and their templates. The important aspects of the specialised requirements specification tool implementation are also overviewed. Key words: business rules, information system, repository, requirements specification. 1.

End-user service composition is a promising way to ensure flexible, quick and personalized information provision and utilization, and consequently to better cope with spontaneous business requirements. For end-users to compose services directly, issues like service granularity, service organization and business-level semantics are critical. End-users will certainly be at loss if they have to select from a long list of available Web services expressed in IT jargons. This article introduces the concept of personalized active service spaces and focuses on the use of business services, service dependency rules, and service personalization rules to support end-user service composition. It addresses two key issues in end-user composition: how to utilize the user preference and context to restrict the scope of applicable services for selection, and how to capture and utilize dependencies or usage patterns between services in order to provide guidance and enforce temporal/sequential restrictions on service invocations for end-user service compositions. 1

Abstract. Rule-based programming paradigm is omnipresent in number of engineering domains. However, there are some fundamental semantical differences between it, and classic programming approaches. No generic solution for using rules to model business logic in classic software has been provided so far. In this paper a new approach for Generalized Rule-based Programming (GREP) is given. It is based on a use of advanced rule representation called XTT, which includes an extended attribute-based language, a non-monotonic inference strategy, with explicit inference control on the rule level. The paper shows, how some typical programming constructions, as well as classic programs can be modelled in this approach. The paper also presents possibilities of efficient integration of this technique with existing software systems. 1

Abstract. In the paper Output driven Information systems (IS) requirements specification method (ODRES) is overviewed emphasizing the problems of recording certain requirements. It is suggested that the method can be extended with business rules recording capabilities. Business rules-based requirements specification method is used to extend ODRES by incorporating method’s rules submodel into an ODRES metamodel in order to support nonstructural business rules as additional knowledge about static and dynamic aspects of IS. Presented extension of ODRES concerns only the specification of dynamic aspects of IS. BRS RuleSpeak, which is the basis for a suggested rules submodel, is also overviewed in the paper and the benefits of the extension are outlined. 1.