Call for Papers

Rule Representation, Interchange and Reasoning in Distributed, Heterogeneous Environments

Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Guest Editors: N. Bassiliades, G. Governatori, A. Paschke, J. Dix

Motivation

In recent years rule based technologies have enjoyed remarkable adoption in two areas: (1) Business Rule 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 turn the Web into 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, and can be interpreted and executed on any platform.

This special issue solicits state-of-the-art approaches, solutions and applications in the area of Rule Representation, Reasoning and Interchange in the context of distributed, (partially) open, heterogeneous environments, such as the Semantic Web, Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, Event-Driven Architectures and Service-Oriented Computing. We strongly advise that solicited contributions should clearly identify the target class of applications they enable.

Topics

Original contributions, not currently under review or accepted by another journal, are solicited in relevant areas including (but not limited to) the following:

• Rule Representation and Languages
  
  • Rule languages for exchanging and processing information through the web
    
  • Representation and meta-annotation of rules and rule sets for publication and interchange
    
  • Event-driven/action rule languages and models
    
  • Rule-based event processing languages and rule-based complex event processing
    
  • Modeling of executable rule specifications and tool support
    
  • Natural-language processing of rules
    
  • Graphical processing, modelling and rendering of rules
    
  • Rules in web 2.0, web 3.0, semantic web technologies and web intelligence research
    
• Reasoning and Rule Engines
  
  • Execution models, rule engines, and environments
    
  • Rule-based (multi-valued) reasoning with and representing uncertain and fuzzy information
    
  • Rule-based reasoning with non-monotonic negation, modalities, deontic, temporal, priority, scoped or other rule qualifications
    
  • Rule-based default reasoning with default logic, defeasible logic, and answer set programming
    
  • Compilation vs. interpretation approaches of rules
    
  • Hybrid rule systems
    
• Rule Interchange and Integration
  
  • Interchange and refactoring of rule bases in heterogeneous execution environments
    
  • Rule-based agility and its role in middleware
    
  • Communication between rule based systems using interchange formats and processing / communication middleware
    
  • Information integration of external data and domain knowledge into rules
    
  • Homogeneous and heterogeneous integration of rules and ontologies
    
  • Extraction and reengineering of platform-independent, interchangeable rules and rule models from existing platform-specific resources
    
  • Rule interchange standards and related industry interchange formats
    
  • Incorporation of rule technology into distributed enterprise application architectures
    
  • Interoperation between different rule formats and ontological domain conceptualization
    
  • Translation of interchangeable and domain-independent rule formats and rule models into executable technical rule specifications
    
• Rule Engineering and Repositories
  
  • Verification and validation of interchanged rule bases in heterogeneous execution environments
    
  • Practical solutions tackling the real-world software engineering requirements of rule-based systems in open, distributed environments
    
  • Collaborative authoring, modeling and engineering of rule specifications and rule repositories
    
  • Management and maintenance of distributed rule bases and rule repositories during their lifecycle
    
• Web Rule Applications
  
  • Applications and integration of rules in web standards
    
  • Applications of rules in the semantic web and pragmatic web
    
  • Applications based on (semantic) web rule standardization or standards-proposing efforts
    
  • Applications of rules in e.g. legal reasoning, compliance rules, security, IT government, security, risk management, trust and proof reasoning, etc.
    
  • E-contracting and automated negotiations with rule-based declarative strategies
    
  • Specification, execution and management of rule-based policies and electronic contracts
    
  • Rule-based software agents and (web) services
  • Theoretical and/or empirical evaluation of rule-based system performance and scalability

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should prepare manuscripts according to the Information for Authors as published in recent issues of the journal or at http://www.computer.org/tkde/. Note that mandatory over-length page charges and color charges will apply. Manuscripts should be submitted through the online IEEE manuscript submission system at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee.

Tentative Schedule

Guest Editors