Preface
      This volume collects the ten demo papers accepted for presentation at the
RuleML2013 International Rule Challenge (the 7th International Web Rule
Challenge), three papers accepted at the Human Language Technology special
track of RuleML2013 and three selected papers accepted for the RuleML2013
Doctoral Consortium.
       The 7th International Web Rule Challenge is one of the highlights at
RuleML2013 Conference, providing a competition among innovative rule-oriented
applications that are aimed at both the research and industrial side. The
International Web Rule Challenge is a forum where new ways of the use of rule-
based systems are presented and practical experiences about implementing these
systems are reported. The Challenge is devoted to disseminating the most
advanced practical experiences with rule-based applications. These papers
include rule-based implementations/tools/applications, editing environments and
IDEs for Web rules, demonstrations of engineering methods, implementations of
rule standards, demos, case studies, use cases, experience reports, best practice
solutions, rule benchmarks and evaluations. The Challenge session also features
an invited demo paper by Monica Palmirani on RAWE, an editor for rule markup
of legal texts and conversion to LegalRuleML based on Akoma Ntoso markup. This
year, the major topics of the Challenge papers were: extensions and
implementations of rule-related standards (W3C RIF, RuleML, SBVR, BPMN, BPEL),
defeasible reasoning, editing environments and IDEs for Web rules, distributed
rule bases and rule services, and e-reports on industrial experience about rule
systems.
       The RuleML Doctoral Consortium is part of the RuleML International
Symposium on Rules since 2011. It attracts Ph.D. researchers in the area of Rules
and Markup Languages from different backgrounds (e.g. theoretical, application,
vertical domain-specific) and encourages a constructive and fruitful
interdisciplinary approach. At the doctoral symposium, students present their
ideas in a dynamic and friendly setting as well as interact with academics and
commercial experts in the field, who evaluate their research projects from both
theoretical and application points of view.
        The Human Language Technology Track addresses the knowledge
acquisition bottleneck that arises when converting the vast amount of regulatory
text on the Web expressed in natural language to formal, machine-processable
rules. Six papers in total were accepted to the Track, three of which appear in the
associated LNCS volume and three of which appear in this volume. Topics
represented in the Track include using controlled languages, extracting semantic
information from legislative text, and mapping English onto fuzzy logic. There are
six talks and one tutorial.
     We warmly thank all authors, students, supervisors, referees, co-chairs,
members of the program committee and the organizing team that made the
RuleML2013 Symposium, International Web Rule Challenge, and Doctoral
Consortium a great success.
July 2013
Paul Fodor, Dumitru Roman, Darko Anicic, Adam Wyner, Monica Palmirani,
Davide Sottara, François Lévy