RuleML, the international umbrella organization for web rule research, standardization, and adoption, invites all stakeholders to Orlando, Florida, October 30-31, 2008

- Rule technologies have improved rapidly in recent years, driven by industry demands. The current generation of these technologies provides a high degree of usability, scalability, and performance.

- The use of rule-based technologies can accelerate the software development cycle significantly at reduced costs and has a positive impact especially in heterogeneous environments such as the Web.

- The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2008), to be held in Orlando, Florida, October 30/31, 2008, is the primary practice-oriented gathering in the field of Web rule standards and rule and event-processing technologies.

- RuleML-2008 covers the whole spectrum of rule-related topics with a wide range of activities, including the presentation of peer-reviewed high-quality industry and research papers, software demonstrations, and invited talks given by leaders from industry and academia.

Bath, May 1, 2008 -- The technology landscape has recently experienced a tremendous advance in the development of rule and event-processing technologies, driven by industrial demands.
In recent years rule based technologies have enjoyed remarkable adoption in two areas: (1) Business Rules Processing and (2) Web-Centered Reasoning. The first trend is caused by the software development life cycle which needs to be accelerated at reduced cost. The second trend is related to the Semantic Web and Service-oriented technologies which aim to supplement the Web with a huge repository of cross-referenced, machine-understandable data and processes. For both trends, rules can be used to extract, derive, transform, and integrate information in a platform-independent manner.

While early rule engines and environments were complex, expensive to maintain, and not very user friendly, the current generation of rule technology provides enhanced usability, scalability and performance, and is less costly. A general advantage of using rules is that they are usually represented in a platform independent manner, often using XML. This fits well into today's distributed, heterogeneous Web-based system environments.

Rules represented in standardized Web formats can be discovered, interchanged and invoked at runtime within and across Web systems. They can be interpreted and executed on any platform.
In response to the strongly increased performance and applicability of rule technologies, the RuleML initiative is pleased to announce the International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2008), to be held in Orlando, Florida, October 30/31, 2008.

Building on the great success of the first RuleML event in 2007, RuleML-2008 is again the primary industry-oriented gathering in the area of rule and event-processing technologies.

RuleML-2008 provides professionals from business and technology as well as researchers from academia and representatives from standardization efforts and communities the most up-to-date information on the rapidly emerging opportunities of computer-processable rules and an exciting venue to exchange new ideas and experiences on issues related to the engineering, management, integration and interoperation of rules in the context of, e.g., the Web and the Semantic Web, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), multi-agent systems and event-driven systems. Doing so, RuleML-2008 enables delegates to better understand rule and event-processing technologies and their emerging potential, and how to exploit these technologies in their organizations.

RuleML-2008 will be held in October 30/31, 2008 in the Buena Vista Palace in the Walt Disney World Resort (hwww.buenavistapalace.com), a well-appointed resort hotel and spa located in landscaped grounds around Lake Buena Vista in Florida. As in 2007, the symposium is co-located with the well-established, practically oriented Business Rules Forum (www.businessrulesforum.com) in order to promote the cross-fertilization between rule and business logic technologies.
The symposium comprises the whole spectrum of topics related to rules, such as the engineering and use of rule-based systems, the integration of rules and other Web technologies, languages and frameworks for rule representation and processing, rule-related web standards, the interoperation of rule-based systems, the incorporation of rule technology into enterprise architectures, applications of rules in (e.g.) e-commerce, legal reasoning, compliance rules, security, IT government, risk management, trust etc., and rule-based reasoning.

RuleML-2008 approaches this topical spectrum with a wide range of activities, from paper presentations and invited talks to social events which help promoting networking among the symposium delegates in an informal setting.
Presentations of industry, software demonstration and research & development papers (peer-reviewed by an international program committee) advance and assess the state of the art in event and rule-based systems. A highly publicized challenge session offers participants the chance to demonstrate their commercial and open source tools, use cases, and applications, and to win prizes awarded for the best applications.

Plenary keynotes and a joint Boxed Lunch Panel about "Rules on the Web" together with the Business Rules Forum feature prominent and visionary speakers, and invited talks given by leaders from industry and academia feature practical topics on event and rule-based computing and industry success stories.

The following sponsors and partner organizations support RuleML-2008: Model Systems, ruleCore, STI Innsbruck, JBoss, a division of Red Hat, European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), Object Management Group (OMG), European Business Rules Conference (EBRC), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Belgian Business Rules Forum, Open Research Society (ORS), BPM-Forum Belgium, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), SIGART (ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence), SIGMIS (ACM Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems), SIGWEB (ACM Special Interest Group on Hypermedia, Hypertext and the Web), IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMCS), IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Autonomous and Autonomic Systems, IEEE SMCS Technical Committee on Intelligent Internet Systems, IEEE SMCS Technical Committee on Distributed Intelligent Systems, MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, and Targetwire.

The latest information about participation, sponsorship opportunities, the submission of papers and further details can be found on the symposium website at http://2008.ruleml.org