Chapter 8: Business Rules and Creating Meaning

Overview

Earlier, we examined how humans and software systems find unstructured information and interpret it. However, much more is going on semantically in business systems. Systems create new information and challenge that which is presented as new information. How it does this is the subject of this chapter. It is where semantics and business rules meet.

To clarify the distinction between a business rules–based system and a traditional system, we'll return to the factory analogy presented in Chapter 3. We then examine how the business rules approach builds on semantics to create vastly improved applications that are flexible. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the scope of applications and rules, and how that scope affects their building and deployment.

Note

The terminology in this chapter follows that established by the business rules community.^[39] In some cases this terminology is slightly different from that used by the artificial intelligence (AI) community. Where I have found a difference, I've highlighted it to minimize confusion.

^[39]See http://www.businessrulesgroup.org for further information.