Preface




This volume collects the selected contributions of the RuleML2011@IJCAI Doctoral Con-
sortium, the RuleML@IJCAI poster session papers, and the demo papers accepted for
presentation at the RuleML2011@BRF Challenge.
The RuleML doctoral consortium is a new initiative of the International Symposium on
Rules, RuleML, to attract and promote Ph.D. research in the area of Rules and Markup
Languages. The doctoral symposium offers to students a close contact with leading ex-
perts on the field, as well as the opportunity to present and discuss their ideas in a dynamic
and friendly setting. The first edition of the RuleML Doctoral Consortium took place dur-
ing the first part of the 5th International Symposium on Rules (RuleML 2011@IJCAI)
held on July 19th, 2011 in Barcelona. We include here the four selected papers of the doc-
toral consortium that resulted in lively presentations and discussion, which unfortunately
cannot be reflected in print. Elisa Marengo’s work, supervised by Matteo Baldoni and
Cristina Baroglio, provides a way of specifying patterns of interactions by extending com-
mitment protocols to account for temporal regulations. Woznowski’s work, supervised
by Alun Preece, describes a system architecture integrating rules with sensor middleware,
with a pilot application to tracking of visitor locations in the healthcare domain. An-
tonius Weinzierl addresses the problem of inconsistency management in heterogeneous
knowledge bases, described as multi-context systems. Jak’s work proposes a rule-based
query answering method for relational data, using hybrid reasoning and forward chain-
ing, exploiting the Jess based implementation for querying a knowledge base of economic
crimes.
The RuleML@IJCAI poster authored by Selner, Schwarz, and Zinser presented a poster
paper describing IT service management combining business rules and business processes
described in SVBR.
The Rule Challenge has reached its 5th year anniversary. It has taken place on Novem-
ber 4th, 2011 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (USA), in the context of the second part of the
5th International Symposium on Rules (RuleML2011@BRF). The Rule Challenge is de-
voted to disseminate the most advanced practical experiences with rule-based applications,
where state-of-the-art solutions and recent research proposals meet the concrete needs of
the market. This year, four main topics have emerged:

   1. Combination of rules, objects and ontologies, towards the development of integrated
      systems able to deal with knowledge-intensive domains and hybrid reasoning.


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   2. eHealth and clinical applications, dealing with rules and very large information
      sources that combine structured and non-structured information.

   3. Rule editors that exploit parsing mechanism, ontologies and semi-automated com-
      position techniques in order to facilitate the modelling task.
   4. Improvement of tools related to RuleML as a standardisation effort.

In particular, Bak, Falkowski and Jedrzejek present a system using rules and ontologies to
query relational databases. O’Connor, Richards, Martins, Bingen, Tu and Das introduce a
semantic web-enabled system to query and visualise temporal data. Erdem, Erdogan and
Oztok describe a software system that provides biomedical query answering capabilities
by exploiting Answer Set Programming. In their work, Sottara, Fry, Aliverti, Salatino,
Harby, Killen, Nguyen and Wright define a unified architecture for a knowledge intensive
patient healthcare management and implement it to warn the patients of an high probability
of developing some diseases in the future. Salatino, Aliverti and Calcaprina show how pro-
cesses and rules can be suitably combined to deal with complex scenarios such as service
provision in the case of emergencies. Teymourian, Rohde and Paschke analyse the pos-
sibility to use background knowledge about events and their relation with other concepts
to improve the quality of complex event processing, discussing the application of their
approach in the stock market domain. Gordon presents a software that supports the con-
struction, evaluation and visualisation of arguments by exploiting defeasible and semantic
knowledge, and shows how it can be exploited to check compatibility issues among open-
source software licenses. Marinos, Gazzard and Krause provide an implementation of a
web-based SBVR editor capable of in-line automatic highlighting and auto-completion
suggestions. Athan develops a web-based service for permitting the validation of XML
instances using particular modules of the large family of RuleML1.0 language in Relax
NG schemas. Finally Zaho, Paschke, Ali, and Boley present a web-based collaborative
system that provides support to the organising committee of a symposium by efficiently
handling complex queries on the domain.
We would like to warmly thank all students, supervisors, referees, co-chairs, members of
the program committee and the organising team that made the doctoral consortium and
the RuleML2011@IJCAI Doctoral Consortium and the RuleML2011@BRF Challenge a
great success.



November 2011                                                          Stefano Bragaglia
                                                                  Carlos Viegas Damásio
                                                                          Marco Montali
                                                                           Charles Petrie
                                                                            Alun Preece
                                                                           Mark Proctor
                                                                       Umberto Straccia




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