N. Bassiliades, G. Gottlob, F. Sadri, A. Paschke, D. Roman, (Eds.), “Rule Technologies: Foundations, Tools, and Applications”, Proceedings of 9th International Symposium, RuleML 2015, Berlin, Germany, August 2-5, 2015, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9202, Springer 2015, ISBN 978-3-319-21541-9.
The annual International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML) is an international conference on research, applications, languages, and standards for rule technologies. It has evolved from an annual series of international workshops since 2002, international conferences in 2005 and 2006, and international symposia since 2007. RuleML 2015 was the ninth symposium of this series, collocated in Berlin, Germany, with the 25th
jubilee edition of the International Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE-25), the 9th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR 2015), the 11th Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2015), and the 7th Workshop on Formal Ontologies Meet Industry (FOMI 2015).
RuleML is a leading conference aiming to build bridges between academia and industry in the field of rules and their applications, especially as part of the semantic technology stack. It is devoted to rule-based programming and rule-based systems including production rule systems, logic programming rule engines, and business rule engines and business rule management systems, Semantic Web rule languages and rule
standards (e.g., RuleML, SWRL, RIF, PRR, SBVR, DMN, CL, Prolog), rule-based event processing languages (EPLs) and technologies, and research on inference rules, transformation rules, decision rules, and ECA rules.
This annual symposium is the flagship event of the Rule Markup and Modeling Initiative (RuleML). The RuleML Initiative (http://ruleml.org) is a nonprofit umbrella organization of several technical groups from academia, industry, and government working on rule technology and its applications. Its aim is to promote the study, research, and application of rules in heterogeneous distributed environments such as the Web. RuleML maintains effective links with other major international societies and acts as intermediary between various specialized rule vendors, applications, industrial and academic research groups, as well as standardization efforts from, e.g., W3C, OMG, OASIS, and ISO. One of its major contributions is the Rule Markup Language, a unifying family of XML-serialized rule languages spanning across all industrially relevant kinds of Web rules.
The technical program of RuleML 2015 included presentations of novel rule-based technologies, such as Semantic Web rule languages and standards, rule engines, formal and operational semantics, and rule-based systems. Besides the regular research track, RuleML 2015 included four special research tracks: a track on Complex Event Processing, with the main theme of Uncertainty Handling in Complex Event Processing, a
track on Existential Rules and Datalog+/-, a track on Legal Rules and Reasoning, and a track on Rule Learning. These tracks reflect the significant role of rules in several research and application areas, which include: the relation between databases and rules, reasoning over actions and events and developing reactive systems, aspects related to using rules in legal applications, and automatically discovering rules from mining data.
A new feature of RuleML 2015 was the inclusion of an Industry track, describing practical applications of rules and the state of the art of rule-based business cases.
Special highlights of this year’s symposium included two keynote talks:
– Michael Genesereth, from Stanford University, USA, presenting the Herbrand Manifesto
– Thom Fruehwirth, from the University of Ulm, Germany, presenting an overview of Constraint Handling Rules
There was also one invited talk:
– Avigdor Gal, from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, presenting a framework for mining the rules that guide event creation.
In addition, the program included the 9th International Rule Challenge, dedicated to practical experiences with rule-based applications, a special challenge (RecSysRules 2015) focusing on rule learning algorithms applied to recommender problems using the linked open data cloud for feature set extension, the 5th RuleML 2015 Doctoral Consortium, which focused on PhD research in the area of rules and markup languages, and finally, a poster session.
The contributions in this volume include a set of invited papers, research track papers, and industry track papers. Invited papers included two full papers for the keynote talks, one full paper and one abstract for the invited talks, and two track papers. The research papers included a selection of 22 full papers and one short research paper, which were presented during the technical program of RuleML 2015. The research papers were selected from 54 submissions through a peer-review process. Each paper was reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee and the Program Committee chairs. For the papers submitted to one of the four special research tracks, the track chairs were also involved in the reviewing phase. Industry track papers included a selection of three papers (out of nine submissions, which underwent a peer-review process).
Owing to the above efforts, RuleML 2015, like its predecessors, offered a high-quality technical and applications program, which was the result of the joint effort of the members of the RuleML 2015 Program Committee.
A special thanks is due to the track chairs, the excellent Program Committee, and the additional reviewers for their hard work in reviewing the submitted papers. Their criticisms and very useful comments were instrumental in achieving a high-quality publication. We also thank the authors for submitting high-quality papers, responding to the reviewers’ comments, and abiding by our production schedule. We further wish to thank the keynote and invited speakers for their inspiring talks. We are very grateful to the organizers of all the collocated events, CADE, RR, RW, and FOMI, for enabling this fruitful collocation with RuleML 2015. RuleML 2015 was financially supported by industrial companies and scientific journals and was technically supported by several professional societies. We wish to thank our sponsors, whose financial support helped
us offer this event, and whose technical support allowed us to attract many high-quality submissions. Last, but not least, we would like to thank the development team of the EasyChair conference management system and our publisher, Springer, for their support in the preparation and publication of this volume of proceedings.
