Rule engine (JBoss Rules/Drools) integration.

[pawelu]

Hi gurus, I would like to ask the following quesion. What do You think of integrating JBoss Rules (former Drools) rule engine for rules management. I am thinking of creating DSL (JBoss Rules - Domain Specific Language) for Alfresco. DSL could be  some form of mapping between/amongs Alfresco types and aspects. We could get IDE integration (JBoss has such an IDE) maybe some kind of web based rule editor (decision tables could be done this way) and so on and so on. I would like to also focus your attension to rdf (for example Sesame or maybe Jena) for metadata storage…. They both work on a database, have a query language. But the latter case is just a quick and spontanous idea.   Please share your thoughts…

[rwetherall]

Hi,

Sounds like it could be an interesting project.

Perhaps you would consider starting some design discussions in the contributions area in the Wiki or creating a Forge project.

Let me know if you are interested,

Cheers
Roy

[rdanner]

Hi gurus, I would like to ask the following quesion. What do You think of integrating JBoss Rules (former Drools) rule engine for rules management. I am thinking of creating DSL (JBoss Rules - Domain Specific Language) for Alfresco. DSL could be  some form of mapping between/amongs Alfresco types and aspects. We could get IDE integration (JBoss has such an IDE) maybe some kind of web based rule editor (decision tables could be done this way) and so on and so on. I would like to also focus your attension to rdf (for example Sesame or maybe Jena) for metadata storage…. They both work on a database, have a query language. But the latter case is just a quick and spontanous idea.   Please share your thoughts…

Hope you are interested.  Several people here would interested in the rules thought, the RDF thought and probably even the intersection. Yay! services will be much more awsome when they come with semantic signatures 😜

[alexander]

I would like to also focus your attension to rdf (for example Sesame or maybe Jena) for metadata storage…. They both work on a database, have a query language.

Iteresting enaugh to hear about RDF, Sesame etc. Some time ago I was exploring possibilities of faceted navigation in Alfresco, and found that Alfresco DB schema resembles RDF quite a bit. I would not be surprised if you can use RDF storage for Alfresco instead of relational databases, or provide thin layer over DB to expose Alfresco metadata as RDF. Some RDF engines combine DB storage and Lucene to provide RDF engine functionality with descent speed.

[j-wicz]

Elias Torres mentioned in a IT-Conversation Podcast http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1162.html that interpreting non-RDF datasource as RDF is current task for the Semantic Web crowd.

Having a "Jena-View" of Alfresco would be really nice, but unfortunatly the only contribution there is D2RQ and it is GPL, so out of our scope. http://jena.sourceforge.net/contrib/contributions.html

[paulhh]

Being an old AI hack, I've been watching the RDF space for many years - and know that one of the key steps for acceptance and use is for systems to provide live mapping of triples in tight integration, rather than RDF - which is really an interchange format.

We did consider using RDF for Alfresco metedata storage, e.g. in Jena, but had hit issues on performance in a previous project, so had to go our own way.  Providing an interface to logic/semantic engines is the way to go, rather than force all data into RDF DBs - look at what hasn't happened with Object Databases: RDBMS is king.

We also looked at Drools, but for what we wanted it was both too much and too little.  For me, the key benefit of that kind of system is either the RETE algorithm giving good performance with large rule sets, or ease of defining rule by business users/analysts.

As we fill out the core ECMS capabilities, we'll start looking at more interesting features.  Given as part of my PhD, many years ago, I developed a forward & backward chaining, frame-based system that was augmented with neural networks, then you'll get an idea about what sort of reasoning I'd like to be possible on top of a modern content respository.

So, if anyone is serious about blue-sky integrations with RDF-based reasoners, do keep me informed!

Cheers
Paul.

[gilles]

I would like to have the state of play rearding Alfresco  'Rules configuration' capabilities?

I can't find many documentation about this kind of feature in the current Community version 2.9B.
What I would like to be able to do is to set (configure) some rules for my data structure (like 'my:folder only contains my:subfolder types').
Thanks for any info.
Gilles