On the Foundations of Web-Based Registries for Business Rules

Summary

In the last eight years, registries for e-business, such as ebXML or UDDI, enabling enterprise of any size and in any geographical location to conduct their businesses on the World Wide Web, were developed. Applications in domains such as insurance (for example, insurance rating), financial services (loans, claims routing and management, fraud detection), government (tax calculations), telecom customer (care and billing), e-commerce (personalizing the user’s experience, recommender systems, auctions), and so on benefit greatly from using rule engines. Therefore, sharing rulesets becomes a necessity for many B2B businesses. This work presents a basic architecture of building a Web-based registry for rules. The main goal of the registry is to allow rulesets discovery. Registry entries contain both required ruleset related data (such as ruleset URI or properties describing their intended scope) and optional metadata covering additional properties such as last modified date.