Semantic Web Days
2007

Press Release

Munich, 24th of May 2007

Semantic Web and Business Rules – a marriage?

Semantic Web Days @ the European Business Rules Conference 2007 (EBRC)
June 18 – 20 in Duesseldorf, Germany
Organised by the Network of Excellence REWERSE

Semantic Web technologies are nowadays essential for web-based applications. Leading analysts such as Gartner add Semantic Web technologies to the key technology themes.
Yet another field has become increasingly important: Business Rules technologies are dealing with the semantic representation of business processes and the influence of business intelligence.
"The Business Rules community and Semantic Web community talk about the same things, but by people with a different background. The Business Rules community is driven by the practical experiences of business people and business consultants while the Semantic Web community is a vision of scientists driven by (mostly) scientific publications", said Silvie Spreeuwenberg, co-founder and director of LibRT.
Based on this observation, a better understanding of each others work is important to achieve a new vision: a 'semantic business' that enables a practical approach to business problems.
The aim of the Semantic Web Days @ the European Business Rules Conference is to get a better understanding of the differences and similarities that exist between the Semantic Web and Business Rules community.

Business Case:
Real-world applications scenarios for semantic technologies used in Business Intelligence (BI) are developed within the RTD project MUSING (MUlti-industry, Semantic-based next generation business IntelliGence), co-funded by the European Commission, within the 6th Framework Programme, Information Society. MUSING provides semantics-driven BI services for three application areas with high social impact: Financial Risk Management (FRM), Internationalisation and IT Operational Risk.
In one of the use cases in the FRM area we investigate the use of an ontology infrastructure, together with rule-based and statistical natural language processing, for guide the automated process of extracting and merging relevant information from both structured and unstructured (financial) documents. This process allows to include qualitative information, typically contained in unstructured documents, like news articles, in systems that are designed for rating and or scoring companies, adding thus a high-level of semantics and transparency to decision procedures towards credit accordance to companies.

Thierry Declerck, senior consultant at DFKI and coordinator of the research activities in MUSING will give a deeper insight of business cases that kind at the European Business Rules Conference 2007.

Note to the editor:
The Semantic Web Days at the 6th European Business Rules Conference will take place from 18th – 20th June in Duesseldorf, Germany.

For more Information about the EBRC or registration, please visit: www.eurobizrules.org

European Business Rules Conference 2007 (EBRC)
From 18th – 20th June, the EBRC 2007 will take place in Düsseldorf, Germany.
The two day conference (19th and 20th June) will be preceded by a tutorial day (June 18), in which beginners in the field of Business Rules will get a quick introduction of the main topics.
The EBRC is the leading European event on Business Rules and receives business and ICT professionals from European countries, as well as from other continents.
For more Information, please visit: www.eurobizrules.org

Network of Excellence REWERSE - Reasoning on the Web with Rules and Semantics
REWERSE is a leading European research project on Reasoning on the Web. REWERSE develops rule-based languages and applications to query and to automatically reason over Web data. REWERSE's technologies thus enhance today's conventional Web towards a more intelligent "Semantic Web".
The objectives are to develop a set of inter-operable rule-languages supporting various forms of Web reasoning, to provide support tools for reasoning on the Web like rule modelling, verbalization or visualisation, and to test these technologies on various Semantic Web application domains like personalisation, reasoning with time and space or with Bioinformatics data. REWERSE aims to develop open pre-standards of its technologies. As a W3C member REWERSE is involved in various standardisation activities.
For more Information, please visit: www.rewerse.net