FAQs About RuleXpress^™
What Role Will It Play in Your Organization?

What is RuleXpress?
RuleXpress is a business-friendly workstation providing direct business-level interaction with business rules, including the business terminology that supports them.

Why RuleXpress for Your Organization?
RuleXpress proactively addresses the costs of business-level miscommunication, stovepipe vocabularies, and misinterpretation of policy. The simple notion is to enable highly refined specification of business logic before it gets to IT system development and implementation under IT platforms. RuleXpress never requires business people to force-fit their knowledge into forms unnatural to them as is often the case under IT methodologies.

Specifically, RuleXpress provides business-oriented support for measuring and improving quality in capturing, assessing and changing business rules and the related business vocabulary. In doing so, RuleXpress directly addresses significant risks in today’s business environment, including how to:

• Retain core business-worker knowledge.
• Ensure compliance with regulation.
• Educate new business workers quickly in the thoughtware of the organization.

Who is RuleXpress for?
RuleXpress is for direct use by business workers in developing, analyzing and retaining the elements of corporate guidance and know-how (i.e., business rules). RuleXpress permits business workers to directly shape the rules of corporate governance and special knowledge competencies, and to directly build the comprehensive business glossaries (semantics) needed to support them.

What is RuleXpress Not Intended For?
RuleXpress is not intended in any way to substitute for or replace any of the following:

• Run-time rule engines, inference engines, or similar IT tools or platforms used to evaluate and/or execute rules.
• Editors that support specification and/or management of rules for such tools.
• Software requirements tools supporting specification of IT application systems embedding or using such rules.

What will Business Workers Typically Use RuleXpress To Do?
Commonplace activities include the following.

• Term Management. Define and manage a business community glossary.
• Fact Modeling. Define structured relationships between the various terms of the glossary, captured and portrayed visually.
• Rule Capture. Define the business rules of the business community in a point-and-click, grammatically “smart” environment.
• Rule Group Presentation. Define groups of sequenced rules for presentation and revision purposes.
• Assess Quality. Assess the quality of a specific term, fact or rule, or of an entire glossary and collection of business rules in-depth to discover logical and grammatical problems at the business level.
• Report. Navigate the various complex dependencies among terms, facts and rules, and report on them.
• Import Terminology and Business Rules. Import terms and rules from Microsoft Excel and other sources.

What is the Architecture of RuleXpress?

The Business Center is the heart of the RuleXpress suite of applications. Business workers use the Business Center to undertake their business vocabulary and rule activities directly. It provides integrated help and instructions on an as-needed, in-line basis, as well as a large inventory of examples.

The activities offered by the Business Center are defined for the business worker’s focal activity. By this means, each RuleXpress user (community member) can have his/her own customized application constructed to serve his/her day-to-day work in the best manner possible.

How is RuleXpress Managed?
IT staff, advanced business rules analysts, and project managers use the Peripheral Applications of RuleXpress to configure the day-to-day activities of the various business workers.

How Does RuleXpress Relate to Rule Engines?
You would not want to import rules expressed in the language of a commercial inference or rule engine (e.g., production rules) into RuleXpress without reverse-engineering them into business vocabulary and grammar. In native form, such imported rule specifications are of little value to business people. RuleXpress is not intended to manage rules expressed in the language of a rule engine.

Business rule statements in business form must be communicated to the IT department for implementation. This translation into programming statements is seldom, if ever, a simple 1-to-1 conversion.

IT Departments may want to trace from business rule statements in RuleXpress to counterpart IT statements within some rule engine platform(s). Or, IT staff might want to trace in the reverse direction. This bridging can be supported as follows:

• For each business rule in RuleXpress, the IT implementation component(s) relevant to that business rule can be documented.
• RuleXpress publishing methods permit creation of reports and other means of communication to inform the IT Department of new, modified or discontinued business rules.
• For any given commercial rule engine product, custom integration can be undertaken such that business rules statements in RuleXpress are inserted into the appropriate technical rule editor or rule manager. For example, one proven method in certain cases is for a business rule statement to become a comment associated with a particular implementation rule or rule set. Depending on the target platform, such custom integration may require assistance from the development team of that product.

What About Standards?
An OMG standard called Business Semantic of Business Rules (BSBR) is likely to emerge in 2005 or shortly thereafter. Its purpose is to support semantically robust communication between rule-oriented platforms, and to hide implementation details from all business people.

The creators of RuleXpress are among the principals in this initiative, and have participated heavily in its construction since its start-up in early 2003. RuleXpress has been carefully crafted such that business rule statements managed in RuleXpress can be communicated under this standard to any other compliant tool, including rule engines, business logic servers, and other automation platforms.

What Else Should the IT Professional Know about RuleXpress?
The RuleXpress Repository API will provide easy access to the repository by external applications. The database schema of the repository is openly available to customers so that they can write queries directly against the database.

RuleXpress will not place significant emphasis (at least initially) on publishing to third-party proprietary formats. However, support will be made available to customers, partners and/or others who do wish to undertake such development.

RuleXpress will have predefined quality thresholds that must be satisfied to publish or transform repository content to particular formats.

Where is RuleXpress Going?
Some of the features and capabilities in development or planned for RuleXpress are the following.

• Decision Tables. Capture and manage rules in consolidated representations, especially decision tables and possibly decision trees.
• Semantic Search & Replace. Find and replace based on meaning rather than merely on specific text fragments.
• Lexical Support. Look-up terms in an English dictionary.
• Expression Support. Interactive edit and grammatical support to help in expressing business definitions and business rule statements properly.
• Verification Support. Evaluate sets of rules at the business level to avoid inconsistency, incompleteness, conflict, overlap, and redundancy.
• Publishing Methods. Publish a glossary and/or set of rules to an external audience. Methods may include HTML, XML, and RTF, as well as proprietary formats such as Microsoft Office or Rule Engine Products.
• Multi-Language Support. Support for capturing terms, facts and rules in multiple languages (e.g., English, Dutch, Spanish, etc.), with language conversions based on defined common meanings.
• Property Management. Distinguish primitive, custom and user properties, and specify conditions under which the property value is mandatory.

Who is Behind RuleXpress?
RuleArts is a joint venture of:

Business Rule Solutions, LLC (www.BRSolutions.com), the world leader in applied business rule techniques.
LibRT Quality Management Technology LLC. (www.LibRT.com), the world leader in commercial rule verification and validation software.