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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Rule Engine - Drools

What is a Rule Engine?

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is a very broad research area that focuses on "Making computers think like people" and includes disciplines such as Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms, Decision Trees, Frame Systems and Expert Systems. Knowledge representation is the area of A.I. concerned with how knowledge is represented and manipulated. Expert Systems use Knowledge representation to facilitate the codification of knowledge into a knowledge base which can be used for reasoning - i.e. we can process data with this knowledge base to infer conclusions. Expert Systems are also known as Knowledge-based Systems and Knowledge-based Expert Systems and are considered 'applied artificial intelligence'. The process of developing with an Expert System is Knowledge Engineering. EMYCIN was one of the first "shells" for an Expert System, which was created from the MYCIN medical diagnosis Expert System. Where-as early Expert Systems had their logic hard coded, "shells" separated the logic from the system, providing an easy to use environment for user input. Drools is a Rule Engine that uses the Rule Based approached to implement an Expert System and is more correctly classified as a Production Rule System.

The term "Production Rule" originates from formal grammar - where it is described as "an abstract structure that describes a formal language precisely, i.e., a set of rules that mathematically delineates a (usually infinite) set of finite-length strings over a (usually finite) alphabet" (wikipedia).

For more information visit the following URL
https://hudson.jboss.org/hudson/job/drools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/trunk/target/docs/html/ch02.html



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