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Oct 20 2008: extracted from another article and expanded.

Every few years for the past 20 years, there has been an initiative to bring a higher level of information technology to the healthcare industry. It gives one a strong sense of having seen it all before.

But, Healthcare is still a knowledge-intensive industry in need of advanced information technology and is still one of the most promising areas for rule-based technology. It might make serious inroads in improving the quality and availability of medical data within the next few years.

Updated Oct 20 2008:

There were some interesting responses to an article at the athico.com blog site about rule engine performance.

A comment by Greg Barton outlines a disaster story about the inappropriate use of a rule engine to implement transaction processing for a large telecom application.

Software patents have been a big issue in Europe for the past several years. The debate hinges on establishing finally and forever what is a "trivial" versus "non-trivial" contribution to some field of knowledge. The European patent authorities have employed a very inclusive definition of "non-trivial" and, in effect, grant patents on ideas.

The general definition of ontology at Wikipedia ( versus the computer science definition given in the main link ) is "a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being". In some ways, the general definition is more appropriate to modeling organizations - the target audience for an organizational ontology is people, not computers.

The shortest and most intuitive definition of term ontology is 'a description of things that be'. For most purposes, it may be the best definition.

Why the SOA Reference Architecture ?

The OASIS SOA Reference Architecture is one of the best introductions to SOA, providing a complete, consistent and largely non-technical set of concepts and definitions for SOA technology. It may be the easiest way to understand SOA without digging through volumes of arcane technical standards and XML specifications.

Do business rules need to be rigidly enforced ?

Advances in information technology in the last 20 years have made it easier to purchase products and services.  Although the impact of information technology has been stunning, I doubt if many customers would assert that technology has made it easier to deal with rigid customer support policies and processes, quite the opposite.  It can take months to correct a business process or system processing error.  This is often the result of overly constrained systems that cannot adapt to changing customer requirements or circumstances.