Preface Notes:
• "Recent" here means since approximately summer 1999; "Earlier" means before then.
• "Papers" here means: journal, conference/workshop, and working papers; and technical reports as well.
• Recent papers are organized to group together successor/predecessor versions, as papers evolve to be extended and revised. I.e., each entry also often includes an extended/revised working paper version and/or earlier versions.
  • Conference/workshop talk slides, too, are usually included with the papers.
  • For chronological sequencing purposes, the date is taken to be that of the most recent refereed publication version or, lacking that, of the most recent working paper or technical report version.

Selected Recent Papers Categorized by Topic: (chronological within each category) (NB: needs updating!)

!!NOTE!!: the MOST RECENT papers may not yet be listed here, but ONLY in the CHRONOLOGICAL listing of papers, due to lags in website maintenance/editing.

Preface Notes:
• There is some overlap between the categories.
• other general Preface Notes

• RulesKR: Rules and Ontologies knowledge representation for the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services
• BizSWS: Business Implications of Semantic Web Services:
  • E-Contracting
  • Financial Information Integration
  • Business Process Knowledge for Semantic Web Services
  • Trust Management / Security Authorization
  • Travel Packages
• Other Knowledge-Based E-Commerce

*RulesKR: Rules and Ontologies knowledge representation for the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services:

• Including: Situated and Courteous Logic Programs; Description Logic Programs; RuleML, SWRL, SWSL, and rule system Interoperability; and Courteous Inheritance. (With motivating examples usually from e-commerce policies and processes.)

• "Semantic Web Services Framework", 2005.
• "SweetDeal: Representing Agent Contracts With Exceptions using Semantic Web Rules, Ontologies, and Process Descriptions", 2004. (Earlier conference versions too.)
• "Representing E-Commerce Rules Via Situated Courteous Logic Programs in RuleML", 2004. (Earlier conference version too.)
• "Description Logic Programs: Combining Logic Programs with Description Logic", 2003.
• "SweetJess: Inferencing in Situated Courteous RuleML via Translation to and from Jess Rules", 2003.
• "A Roadmap for Rules and RuleML in the Semantic Web", part of "Where are the rules?", 2003.
• "Delegation Logic: A Logic-based Approach to Distributed Authorization", 2003.
• "Combining Different Business Rules Technologies: A Rationalization", 2000. Combining Logic Programs with Workflow pre- and post-conditions
• "A Declarative Approach to Business Rules in Contracts: Courteous Logic Programs in XML", 1999.
• See also, in Recent Standards Proposal Reports:
  • "Rule Markup Language Initiative (RuleML)".
  • "SWRL: A Semantic Web Rules Language Combining OWL and RuleML".
  • "FOL RuleML: The First-Order Logic Web Language".
  • "Semantic Web Services Language". Planned for spring 2005.
• See also, in Selected Earlier Papers Categorized by Topic (from 1995-1999):
  • Courteous Logic Programs (earlier)
  • Examples of business rules in Courteous LP (earlier)
  • Situated Logic Programs (earlier)
  • XML Agent Communication (earlier)

*BizSWS: Business Implications of Semantic Web Services:

• *E-Contracting (using rules and ontologies):
  • "Extending the SweetDeal Approach for Procurement using SweetRules and RuleML", 2005.
  • "Semantic Web Services Framework", 2005. (Especially the Policy Rules for E-Commerce section of the SWSF Application Scenarios document.)
  • "SweetDeal: Representing Agent Contracts With Exceptions using Semantic Web Rules, Ontologies, and Process Descriptions", 2004.
  • "Automated Negotiation from Declarative Contract Descriptions", 2002.
  • "A Declarative Approach to Business Rules in Contracts: Courteous Logic Programs in XML", 1999.

• *Financial Information Integration (using ontologies and rules):
  • "Contextual Alignment of Ontologies for Semantic Interoperability", 2004.
  • "Towards Ontological Context Mediation for Semantic Web Database Integration: Translating COIN Ontologies Into OWL", 2004.
  • "Financial Information Integration in the Presence of Equational Ontological Conflicts", 2002.
  • "Knowledge Integration to Overcome Ontological Heterogeneity: Challenges from Financial Information Systems", 2002.
  • See also: PhD thesis by my student A. Firat, "Information Integration using Contextual Knowledge and Ontology Merging", 2003.

• *Business Process Knowledge for Semantic Web Services (using ontologies and rules):
  • "Semantic Web Services Framework", 2005.
  • "Beyond Monotonic Inheritance: Towards Semantic Web Process Ontologies", 2003.
  • "SweetDeal: Representing Agent Contracts With Exceptions using Semantic Web Rules, Ontologies, and Process Descriptions", 2004.

• *Trust Management / Security Authorization (using rules):
  • "Delegation Logic: A Logic-based Approach to Distributed Authorization", 2003.

• *Travel Packages (using e-contracts, rules, and Semantic Web Services):
  • "Automated Negotiation from Declarative Contract Descriptions", 2002.
  • See also: PhD thesis by my student A. Firat, "Information Integration using Contextual Knowledge and Ontology Merging", 2003.
  • See also: M.S. Thesis by my student Y. Kabbaj: "Strategic and Policy Prospects for Semantic Web Services Adoption in the U.S. Online Travel Industry", 2003.

*Other Knowledge-Based E-Commerce (including AI, agents):

• "Proceedings of the AAAI-2000 Workshop on Knowledge-Based Electronic Markets". Co-editor.
• "Proceedings of the AAAI-99 Workshop on AI for Electronic Commerce". Co-editor.

Selected Earlier Papers Categorized by Topic: Refereed Publications and Research Reports (1995-1999)

*Courteous Logic Programs (Earlier):

• "Compiling Prioritized Default Rules Into Ordinary Logic Programs", 1999. And ...
  "A Courteous Compiler from Generalized Courteous Logic Programs To Ordinary Logic Programs", extension of the above, 1999.
• "Courteous Logic Programs: Prioritized Conflict Handling for Rules", 1997.

*Examples and demos of business rules using Courteous LP for e-commerce (Earlier):

• "DIPLOMAT: Compiling Prioritized Default Rules Into Ordinary Logic Programs, for Electronic Commerce Applications (Extended Abstract of Intelligent Systems Demonstration)", 1999.
• Examples in the IBM CommonRules download.

*Situated Logic Programs (Earlier):

• "Building Commercial Agents: An IBM Research Perspective", 1997.
• U.S. Patent: "Flexible Procedural Attachments to Situate Reasoning Systems", 1996.
• "Reusable Architecture for Embedding Rule-based Intelligence in Information Agents", 1995.
• "Globenet and RAISE: Intelligent Agents for Networked Newsgroups and Customer Service Support", 1995.

*XML Agent Communication (Earlier):

• "An Approach to using XML and a Rule-based Content Language with an Agent Communication Language", 1999.

Selected Recent Papers organized Chronologically: (but grouped so that successor/predecessor versions are together)

• Note: Some papers and talks from 2010-2013 are not included here. You can see the SILK and Coherent KS websites for most of those. But even better is to see my current website, which includes more and is kept up-to-date.

• Preface Notes

2010:

• "Defeasibility in Answer Set Programs via Argumentation Theories". By Hui Wan, Michael Kifer, and Benjamin N. Grosof. Proc. 4th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR-2010). To be held Bressanone/Brixen, Italy, September 24, 2010.
  Comment: Extends the LPDA argumentation theory approach enabling higher-order defaults (from our ICLP-2009 paper), used by Hyper LP and SILK, to the ASP KR which permits head disjunction. Also shows a close relationship of Defeasible Logic to Courteous defaults.

  2009:

• "Opportunities for Semantic Web knowledge representation to help XBRL". By Benjamin N. Grosof. Position paper (2 pages) at the Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web . Co-organized by W3C and XBRL International, Inc., and hosted by FDIC. Held Arlington, Virginia, October 5-6, 2009.
  You can get the talk slides as well; those are meatier but this position paper complements them, especially with references and links.

• "Logic Programs with Defaults and Argumentation Theories". By Hui Wan, Benjamin N. Grosof, Michael Kifer, Paul Fodor, and Senlin Liang. Proc. 25th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP-2009). Held Pasadena, California, July 14-17, 2009.
  You can get the talk slides as well.
  Describes the foundational approach to higher-order defaults in the Hyper Logic Programs knowledge representation used by SILK.

  2005:

• "The Production Logic Programs Approach, in a Nutshell: Foundations for Semantically Interoperable Web Rules". By Benjamin N. Grosof. Working Paper of Dec. 19, 2005.
  Comment: A medium-length working paper, that includes new material and also overviews previous material in an integrative fashion. Presented in part at the Kickoff Meeting of the W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) standards Working Group, held Burlingame, CA, 2005, Dec. 8-9, 2005.

• "Defining an Abstract Core Production Rule System". By By Benjamin N. Grosof. Working Paper of Dec. 19, 2005.
  Comment: A fairly short working paper. Complements the PLP Nutshell paper.

• "An Overview of Some Use Cases for Semantic Web Rule Interchange" By Benjamin N. Grosof. Working Paper of Dec. 9, 2005.
  Presented at Kickoff Meeting of the W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) standards Working Group, held Burlingame, CA, 2005, Dec. 8-9, 2005.
  Comment: A short working paper, that overviews our previous work, largely on e-contracting.

• "Rule-based Policies across Multiple E-Services Tasks, using Courteous Logic Programs in RuleML, SWSL, and SweetRules". By By Benjamin N. Grosof, Chitravanu Neogy, and Shashidhara Ganjugunte. Working Paper of Dec. 9, 2005.
  Comment: A relatively short working paper, of an overview nature. Presented in part at the Kickoff Meeting of the W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) standards Working Group, held Burlingame, CA, 2005, Dec. 8-9, 2005.

• "Extending the SweetDeal Approach for E-Procurement using SweetRules and RuleML". Proc. International Conference on Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web (RuleML-2005). You can get the talk slides too. By Sumit Bhansali and Benjamin N. Grosof. Held Galway, Ireland, Nov. 6-10, 2005.

• "Supporting Rule System Interoperability on the Semantic Web with SWRL". Proc. 4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2005), pp. 974-986, held Galway, Ireland, Nov. 6-10, 2005. You can get the talk slides too. By Martin O'Connor, Holger Knublauch, Samson Tu, Benjamin N. Grosof, Mike Dean, William Grosso, and Mark Musen.
  Comment: Focuses largely on the design of the SWRL editor in the Protege OWL Plugin. This complements SweetRules with SWRL rule authoring capabilities. Note that SWRL rules are essentially a special case of RuleML.

• "Semantic Web Services Framework, Version 1.0" . By (alphabetically) Steve Battle, Abraham Bernstein, Harold Boley, Benjamin Grosof, Michael Gruninger, Richard Hull, Michael Kifer, David Martin, Sheila McIlraith, Deborah McGuinness, Jianwen Su, and Said Tabet. May 9, 2005. Published on the web, in cooperation with DAML, WSMO, and W3C.
  Comment: This is a large design report (approx. 287 pages) by the Semantic Web Services Language (SWSL) committee of the Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI). It includes design of languages for rules combined with ontologies, application scenarios and requirements analysis, and core service ontologies.

  The report consists of 4 major documents, along with 4 appendices. I have lead authorship roles for several sections, in addition to contributing to the overall report (details are below).

  • "Semantic Web Services Framework (SWSF) Overview" (approx. 18 pages)

  • "Semantic Web Services Language" (approx. 64 pages)
    Comment: SWSL extends previous RuleML, and includes a presentation syntax for RuleML. I co-led its overall design along with Michael Kifer. I am lead author, in particular, for section 2.7 (The Courteous Rules Layer) and section 3 (Combining SWSL-Rules and SWSL-FOL).

  • "Semantic Web Services Ontology (SWSO)" (approx. 145 pages; 70 pages main, plus 75 pages of appendices)
    Comment: I co-led the creation of SWSL-Rules version of SWSO, along with David Martin. This uses an experimental hypermonotonic-reasoning mapping from the SWSL-FOL version of SWSO.

  • "SWSF Application Scenarios" (approx. 60 pages)
    Comment: I am lead author, in particular, for section 5 (Using Defaults in Domain-Specific Service Ontologies).

  2004:

• "Contextual Alignment of Ontologies for Semantic Interoperability". Proc. WITS-2004.
  • By Aykut Firat, Stuart Madnick, and Benjamin N. Grosof. You can get the talk slides too.
    In: Proc. 14th Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS-2004), pp. 200-205.
    Held in conjunction with the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS-2004), Washington, DC, Dec. 11-12, 2004.

    Comment:

    • Nominated for Best Paper Award (top 4 of 156 submissions) at WITS-2004. WITS is the premier conference on technological aspects of information systems within the business school academic/research community.
    • See also the WITS-2002 paper, to which this is a follow-on, including its comment.

• "Towards Ontological Context Mediation for Semantic Web Database Integration: Translating COIN Ontologies Into OWL". Poster in Proc. ISWC-2004.
  • By Sumit Bhansali, Benjamin N. Grosof, and Stuart Madnick. You can get the talk slides too.
    Poster Paper (2 pages). In: Proc. 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2004).
    Held Hiroshima, Japan, Nov. 7-11, 2004.
    Comment: Full-length Working Paper version is in progress.

• "SweetDeal: Representing Agent Contracts With Exceptions using Semantic Web Rules, Ontologies, and Process Descriptions". IJEC journal, 2004.
  • By Benjamin N. Grosof and Terrence C. Poon.
    In: International Journal of Electronic Commerce (IJEC), 8(4):61-98, Summer 2004, special issue on web e-commerce.
    Note that the version in the journal issue is revised slightly (reformatting and proofreading edits) from the version (version of Nov. 19, 2003) that you can click on above.
    • Conference Versions:
      • An earlier shorter version, "SweetDeal: Representing Agent Contracts With Exceptions using XML Rules, Ontologies, and Process Descriptions", appeared in Proc. 12th Intl. Conf. on the World Wide Web (WWW-2003), held Budapest, Hungary, May 20-23, 2003. (Note that the version in the the electronic proceedings published by the conference has problems with its figures, due to faulty HTML format conversion.) You can also get the corresponding earlier conference version's talk slides.
      • A still earlier version, "Representing Agent Contracts With Exceptions using XML Rules, Ontologies, and Process Descriptions" appeared in: Proc. International Workshop on Rule Markup Languages for Business Rules on the Semantic Web, held 14 June 2002, Sardinia (Italy) in conjunction with the First International Semantic Web Conference ( ISWC-2002). You can get the corresponding earlier workshop version's talk slides too.
    • You can get the corresponding DAML+OIL ontologies (discussed in the paper): pr.daml containing MIT Process Handbook process ontology; and sd.daml containing additional contract ontology.
    
    Comment: Describes an aspect of SweetDeal, our system for rule-based e-contracting, e.g., for deals about Web Services. "Exceptions" means provisions for "things that can go wrong" during performance of a contract. Combines SCLP RuleML with DAML+OIL ontologies and business process descriptions that automate content from the MIT Process Handbook. The Process Handbook is a large, primarily-textual repository frequently used by industry business process designers. Develops a basic approach to combining rules with ontologies, where rule predicates reference ontology classes and properties.

• "Representing E-Commerce Rules Via Situated Courteous Logic Programs in RuleML". ECRA journal, 2004.
  • By Benjamin N. Grosof.
    In: Electronic Commerce Research and Applications (ECRA), 3(1):2-20, Spring 2004, special issue on semantic web and e-commerce.
    Note that the final version in the journal is revised slightly (reformatting and proofreading edits) from the version (version of Sept. 29, 2003) that you can click on above.
    • An earlier conference version, "Representing E-Business Rules for the Semantic Web: Situated Courteous Logic Programs in RuleML", appeared in Proc. Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS-2001), New Orleans, LA, USA, Dec. 15-16, 2001, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS-2001). (Also available in postscript.)
    
    Comment: Includes the first specification of the expressively powerful Situated Courteous case of Logic Programs (SCLP) in RuleML. Describes SweetRules V1, the first prototype of SCLP RuleML inferencing and translation. Discusses their e-business applications including contracting and business policies. (SWEET is acronym for "Semantic WEb Enabling Technology"). The SweetRules V1 prototype was demonstrated at the WITS-2001 refereed systems demonstration program.

  2003:

• "Rules and RuleML in the Semantic Web", part of "Where are the rules?". Short invited research magazine article, 2003.
  • By Ian Horrocks, Jürgen Angele, Stefan Decker, Michael Kifer, Benjamin N. Grosof, and Gerd Wagner.
    IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18(5):76-83, 2003.
    A collection of short strategic approach and position papers, each single-authored.
    A penultimate and slightly longer version of just Benjamin Grosof's position paper, dating from 2003, is available: "A Roadmap for Rules and RuleML in the Semantic Web".
    At the IEEE site, you can access the full article.

• "Beyond Monotonic Inheritance: Towards Semantic Web Process Ontologies". Working Paper, 2003.
  • By Abraham (Avi) Bernstein and Benjamin N. Grosof (NB: order of authorship is alphabetic).
    Working paper of August 16, 2003. Submitted for publication.

    Comment: Gives new "Courteous Inheritance" approach that for the first time represents non-monotonic aspects of object-oriented style inheritance in process ontologies so as to integrate them into the Semantic Web, focusing on the MIT Process Handbook. The approach uses the Courteous Logic Programs subset of RuleML, and is aimed largely for use in Semantic Web Services. The Process Handbook is a large, primarily-textual repository frequently used by industry business process designers.
    The approach has been prototyped: see SweetPH.
    Revised and extended version is in progress, in preparation for journal publication.

• "Description Logic Programs: Combining Logic Programs with Description Logic". Proc. WWW-2003.
  • By Benjamin N. Grosof, Ian Horrocks, Raphael Volz, and Stefan Decker. You can also get the talk slides.
    In: Proc. 12th Intl. Conf. on the World Wide Web (WWW-2003), held Budapest, Hungary, May 20-23, 2003.
    • There was an earlier Working Paper version of Nov. 21, 2002. The working paper was posted publicly by request at the Joint US/EU ad hoc Agent Markup Language Committee (the "Joint Committee") and the W3C WebOnt (Web-Ontology) Working Group (on their archives). The earlier-version (Oct. 17, 2002) talk slides were presented at the DAML Program's Principal Investigator Meeting, held Portland, OR, USA, Oct. 17, 2002.
    
    Comment: Gives a fundamental theoretical approach, which has become highly influential, to combining (1.) rules and (2.) ontologies for the Semantic Web, by first defining and focusing on the intersection of (1.) Logic Programs, the core knowledge representation of RuleML, the leading draft standard for Semantic Web rules, and (2.) Description Logic, the core knowledge representation of W3C's OWL, the leading draft standard for Semantic Web ontologies.
    Open source implementation is available in SweetRules V2 (the SweetOnto component).
    Extended version, with proofs and OWL syntax, is in progress, in preparation for journal publication.
    Also, Raphael Volz's PhD thesis is about DLP.

• "Delegation Logic: A Logic-based Approach to Distributed Authorization". TISSEC journal, 2003.
  • By Ninghui Li, Benjamin N. Grosof, and Joan Feigenbaum. In: ACM Transactions on Information Systems Security (TISSEC), 6(1):128-171, Feb. 2003. An earlier version, "A Practically Implementable and Tractable Delegation Logic" (in pdf; or in postscript), appeared in: Proc. of IEEE Symp. on Security and Privacy, held Oakland, CA, USA, May 2000.
    Comment: Delegation Logic is a technique for specifying and executing policies in distributed trust management, e.g., security authorization. Ninghui Li's PhD dissertation, for which I was co-advisor, discusses it in more detail.
    Lalana Kagal's PhD thesis (2004) and related work on the Rei language for policies is partly based on the Delegation Logic approach, Situated Courteous Logic Programs, and Description Logic Programs.

  2002:

• "Knowledge Integration to Overcome Ontological Heterogeneity: Challenges from Financial Information Systems". Proc. ICIS-2002.
  • By Aykut Firat, Stuart Madnick, and Benjamin N. Grosof. You can also get the talk slides.
    In: Proc. International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS-2002), held Barcelona, Spain, Dec. 16-18, 2002.
    Comment: Discusses use of ontologies and context knowledge for integration of financial information from heterogeneous source databases. This work is part of Aykut Firat's PhD dissertation research; I was co-adviser. The ECOIN prototype ("Extended COntext INterchange" system) is available at the COIN project site.

• "Financial Information Integration in the Presence of Equational Ontological Conflicts". Proc. WITS-2002.
  • By Aykut Firat, Stuart Madnick, and Benjamin N. Grosof. You can also get the talk slides.
    In: Proc. 12th Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS-2002), held in conjunction with the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS-2002), Barcelona, Spain, Dec. 14-15, 2002.

    Comment:

    • Winner of Best Paper Award (1st of 174 submissions, $1000 prize) at WITS-2002. WITS is the premier conference on technological aspects of information systems within the business school academic/research community.
    • Discusses use of equationally-defined ontologies and context knowledge for integration of financial information from heterogeneous source databases, e.g., in e-shopping or financial analysis. This work is part of Aykut Firat's PhD dissertation research; I was co-adviser. The ECOIN prototype ("Extended COntext INterchange" system) is available at the COIN project site.

      Revised and extended version is in progress, in preparation for journal publication.

• "Automated Negotiation from Declarative Contract Descriptions" Computational Intelligence journal, 2002.
  • By Daniel M. Reeves, Michael P. Wellman, and Benjamin N. Grosof.
    In: Computational Intelligence, 18(4):482-500, Nov. 2002, in a special issue on Agent Technologies for Electronic Commerce.
    Also available in postscript format.
    • Conference Versions:
         Earlier versions of this paper were (with same title and authors):
      • A conference paper in Proc. Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents ("Agents 2001"), held Montreal, Canada, May 28-June 1, 2001. Also available in postscript.
        Winner of the Outstanding Student Paper Award for Daniel Reeves there.
        You can also get the talk slides (NB: a preliminary version); also available in postscript.
      • A workshop paper in: Proc. AAAI-2000 Workshop on Knowledge-Based Electronic Markets (KBEM-00), held Austin, TX, USA, July 2000.
        You can get postscript format.
    
    Comment: Discusses how to set up an auction or set of auctions, in a principled manner driven by contract requirements of both buyers and sellers, building upon earlier works by the same set of authors on representing contracts and configuring auctions for automated auction servers. Detailed examples about a travel agent domain for which there recently have been several research-world Trading Agent Competition agent contests held yearly at a major conference. The system is called ContractBot. The approach here is also part of our larger approach SweetDeal.

• "SweetJess: Translating DamlRuleML To Jess". Proc. RuleML-2002. Also: Working Paper 2003-.
  • By Benjamin N. Grosof, Mahesh D. Gandhe, and Timothy W. Finin. You can also get the talk slides.
    In: Proc. International Workshop on Rule Markup Languages for Business Rules on the Semantic Web (later called "RuleML-2002"), held 14 June 2002, Sardinia (Italy) in conjunction with the First International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2002).

    Comment: Describes the design of SweetJess V1. SweetJess is a first-of-a-kind translation from declarative logic programs to production rules, and vice versa -- in particular bidirectionally from SCLP RuleML to Jess, a popular production rule system.

    The prototype of SweetJess V1 was available for user download by web/mail from Aug. 2002 to Nov. 2004, and made use of SweetRules V1. The SweetJess V2 prototype is more powerful and is a component system within SweetRules V2.

    Also describes DamlRuleML, the specification of the first DAML+OIL encoding of SCLP RuleML.

    See instead: There also now is an updated Working Paper "SweetJess: Inferencing in Situated Courteous RuleML via Translation to and from Jess Rules" (version of May 2, 2003); this is recommended over the Workshop paper (but does not include discussion of the DamlRuleML aspect). A further revised and extended version is in progress, in preparation for journal publication.

  2001:

  (See above predecessor-version papers.)

  2000:

• "Combining Different Business Rules Technologies: A Rationalization". Proc. OOPSLA-2000 Workshop.
  • By Isabelle Rouvellou, Lou DeGenaro, Hoi Chan, Kevin Rasmus, Benjamin N. Grosof, Dave Ehnebuske, and Barbara McGee.
    In: Proc. of the OOPSLA 2000 Workshop on Best-practices in Business Rule Design and Implementation, held Minneapolis, MN, USA, Oct. 15, 2000. (alt. workshop URL is here.)

    Comment: A short position paper on how and why to hybridize CommonRules / Courteous Logic Programs (cf. our work) with another business rules technology called Accessible Business Rules (ABR). ABR is oriented towards tight integration into object-oriented design and language tools including for workflow-ish applications.

  1999:

• "A Declarative Approach to Business Rules in Contracts: Courteous Logic Programs in XML". Proc. EC-99.
  • By Benjamin N. Grosof, Yannis Labrou, and Hoi Y. Chan.
    In: Proc. 1st ACM Conf. on Electronic Commerce ( EC-99), ed. Michael P. Wellman. Held Nov. 3-5, 1999, Denver, CO, USA. New York, NY, USA: ACM Press, 1999. (Also available in postscript).

    Comment: Good first paper to read about our approach, now called SweetDeal, to rule-based e-contracts. The approach uses an XML version of our (Situated) Courteous Logic Programs knowledge representation for rules. This paper includes requirements analysis that motivates SCLP, plus examples of business rules/policies in e-contracts. SweetDeal also makes use of SweetRules, our prototype of rule inferencing and translation in SCLP RuleML. RuleML is an emerging industry standard for rules in XML, i.e., for the Semantic Web.

Recent Standards Proposal Reports:

• "Rule Markup Language Initiative (RuleML)". 2001-present
  • Standards Proposal Reports and Material on the RuleML language and Initiative. website.
    Currently Versions 0.8+ of 2004-2005, revised from Versions 0.7+ of Jan. 2001 - 2003.
    By Harold Boley, Benjamin Grosof, Said Tabet, and additional collaborators in the RuleML Initiative (NB: authorship among these three is alphabetic). Includes extensive documentation, news, discussion, summaries, presentations.

    Comment: The leading emerging standard for interoperable web rules in XML, including for semantic web and business rules. It is based on declarative logic programs, including situated courteous logic programs (SCLP), along with first order logic.
    The ECRA journal paper, and the ISWC-2006 Tutorial slides, each provide an overview of RuleML including particularly SCLP RuleML.
    SweetRules V2 provides a set of reference implementations in open source for RuleML inferencing and translation, supporting SCLP and SWRL.

    RuleML is being used heavily by the Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI) in its Language (SWSL), and is beginning to be used by Object Management Group (OMG) in its production rules standards committee. (As of Feb. 2005.)

    A Google search on "RuleML" yields a hit count of over 20,000 as of Feb. 15, 2005.

    Revisions and extensions are in progress, with a new major version planned for release in spring or summer 2005.

• "FOL RuleML: The First-Order Logic Web Language". 2004-present
  • Standards Proposal Research Report.
    Version 0.9 of 2004-11-02 (revised from version 0.7 of 2004-08-10.)
    By Harold Boley, Mike Dean, Benjamin Grosof, Michael Sintek, Bruce Spencer, Said Tabet, and Gerd Wagner. An emerging industry standards proposal that is an ...
    Acknowledged W3C Submission. A W3C Submission once acknowledged by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) becomes a technical report document of W3C.

    Comment: An interoperable web syntax for First Order Logic, as an addition to the RuleML family of sublanguages.

• "SWRL: A Semantic Web Rules Language Combining OWL and RuleML". Report, 2004.
  • By Ian Horrocks, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Harold Boley, Said Tabet, Benjamin N. Grosof, and Mike Dean.
    Standards Proposal Research Report: Version 0.6, Apr. 30, 2004. (Revised from Version 0.5 of Nov. 19, 2003.) An emerging industry standards proposal that is an ...
    Acknowledged W3C Submission. A W3C Submission once acknowledged by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) becomes a technical report document of W3C.

    Comment: Combines a relatively simple subset of RuleML with W3C OWL to express Horn-like rules that are tightly integrated with OWL ontologies. See DAML Rules and the Joint Committee for its creation context. The technical approach builds upon our previous semantic web papers about RuleML, referencing ontologies from rules, and tightly combining rules and ontologies within a single KR.
    A slightly revised version (V0.7+) is in progress as of Dec. 2004.
    See several Recent Invited Talks for additional discussion about SWRL, including usage comments and implementation techniques, e.g., DAML Rules Report May 2004 and ISWC-2006 Tutorial.
    SweetRules implements a number of SWRL tools/capabilites.
    In work in progress, the technical approach is being converged more tightly and thoroughly with RuleML.

• "Semantic Web Services Language Requirements". 2003-present
  • Version 1 of Oct. 2003.
    Edited by Benjamin Grosof, Michael Gruninger, Michael Kifer, David Martin, Deborah McGuinness, Bijan Barsia, and Austin Tate (NB: editorship order is alphabetic). The editors are also the primary authors, but the full set of authors includes a larger set of members of the SWSL Committee. SWSL is the Language part of the Semantic Web Services Initiatve (SWSI).

    Comment: Revised version is in progress, in tandem with preparation of major SWSL design research report planned for release in spring 2005.

• "Semantic Web Services Language". In Preparation 2004-present
  • Version 1 preliminary draft, planned for release in spring 2005.
    By Steve Battle, Daniela Berardi, Benjamin Grosof, Michael Gruninger, Rick Hull, Michael Kifer, David Martin, Sheila McIlraith, Jianwen Su, and others. (NB: authorship set is preliminary and its order is alphabetic). These are the members of the SWSL Committee. SWSL is the Language part of the Semantic Web Services Initiatve (SWSI).

Invited Talks: (slidesets -- usually quite detailed;   includes tutorials)

Note: More updates are pending for 2010+ papers and talks; for now, see the SILK and Coherent KS websites for most of those.

2013:

• "Rulelog as Theoretical Foundation for Universal Health Exchange Language" (20-min.)
  By Benjamin Grosof. Presented at the Universal Health Exchange Language Workshop, Encinitas, CA, USA, June 25-26, 2013.

  ****FULL SLIDESET AVAILABLE****

• Conference Tutorial (AAAI-13) "Semantic Web Rules: Fundamentals, Standards, and Applications" (4-hours)
  • Tutorial Abstract and Overview
  • Full Tutorial Slideset
    
  By Benjamin Grosof, Michael Kifer, and Mike Dean. Presented at the 27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13), Bellevue, WA, USA, July 15, 2013.

  2012:

  ****FULL SLIDESET AVAILABLE****
• Conference Tutorial (ISWC-2012) "Web Rules: Fundamentals, Standards, and Applications" (4-hours)
  • Tutorial Abstract and Overview
  • Full Tutorial Slideset
    
  By Benjamin Grosof, Mike Dean, and Michael Kifer. Presented at the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2012), Boston, MA, USA, November 11, 2012.

  2010:

  ****FULL SLIDESET AVAILABLE****
• Conference Tutorial (ISWC-2010) "Web Rules: Fundamentals, Standards, and Applications" (4-hours)
  • Tutorial Abstract and Overview
  • Full Tutorial Slideset
    
  By Benjamin Grosof, Mike Dean, and Michael Kifer. Presented at the 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2010), Shanghai, China, November 8, 2010.
• ****FULL TUTORIAL SLIDESET****
  Conference Tutorial: "Rules on the Semantic Web: Advances in Knowledge Representation and Standards" (4-hours).
  By Benjamin Grosof, Mike Dean, and Michael Kifer. Presented at the 24th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-10), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, July 10, 2010.
  You can also get the abstract and overview.
  Comment: See instead the more recent ISWC-2010 rules tutorial.

2009:

• Demo poster: "The SILK System: Scalable and Expressive Semantic Rules" (15-min). By Benjamin Grosof, Mike Dean, and Michael Kifer.
  Refereed conference system demonstration poster presentation at the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2009), Chantilly, Virgina, USA, Oct. 27, 2009.
  You can also get the short paper (and its expanded version) about the system and demo, which was published in the conference proceedings.
• "SILK: Higher Level Rules with Defaults and Semantic Scalability" (1.5-hours). By Benjamin Grosof.
  Invited keynote talk at the 2009 Web Reasoning and Rules Conference (RR-2009), Chantilly, Virginia, October 26, 2009.
  You can also get the abstract of the talk, which was published in the conference proceedings.
• ****FULL TUTORIAL SLIDESET****
  Conference Tutorial "Semantic Rules on the Web" (4-hours). By Benjamin Grosof, Mike Dean, and Michael Kifer. Presented at the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2009), at the Westfields Conference Center, Chantilly, Virgina, USA, Oct. 26, 2009.
  You can also get the abstract and overview.
  Comment: See instead the more recent ISWC-2010 rules tutorial.
  Comment: Additional material, esp. about applications, is available in the 6-hour rules tutorial from ISWC-2006.
• "Opportunities for Semantic Web knowledge representation to help XBRL" (30-min). By Benjamin Grosof.
  Invited presentation at the Workshop on Improving Access to Financial Data on the Web . Co-organized by W3C and XBRL International, Inc., and hosted by FDIC. Held Arlington, Virginia, October 5-6, 2009.
  You can get the position paper as well; these talk slides are meatier but that position paper complements them, especially with references and links.
• "Logic Programs with Defaults and Argumentation Theories" (25-min). By Hui Wan, Benjamin Grosof, Michael Kifer, Paul Fodor, and Senlin Liang.
  Technical paper presentation at the 25th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP-2009), Pasadena, California, July 18, 2009.
  You can get the ICLP-2009 paper as well.
  Comment: Overviews the novel technical approach to defaults in SILK's hyper logic programs knowledge representation.
• "Hyper Logic Programs in SILK for Business and Science: An Overview" (25-min). By Benjamin Grosof.
  Invited talk at the Commercial Users of Logic Programming Workshop (CULP-2009), Pasadena, California, July 17, 2009.
  Comment: The longer SemTech-2009 talk provides more details.
• "SILK: Semantic Rules Take the Next Big Step in Expressive Power" (1-hour). By Benjamin Grosof.
  Invited talk at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech-2009), San Jose, California, June 18, 2009.
  You can also get the abstract of the talk.
  Comment: Researchers (as opposed to developers or other business people) should instead see the RR-2009 SILK keynote talk which is more up-to-date and in-depth.
• ****FULL TUTORIAL SLIDESET****
  Conference Tutorial "Rules on the Web" (3-hours) (NB: could use some format etc. bug fixes).
  By Benjamin Grosof, Mike Dean, and Michael Kifer. Presented at the 18th International Conference on the World Wide Web (WWW-2009), Madrid, Spain, April 21, 2009.
  You can also get the abstract of the talk.
  Comment: See instead the ISWC-2009 rules tutorial which is more up-to-date and in-depth.

2008:

• "Hyper Logic Programs in SILK: Redefining the KR Playing Field for Business and VLKB" (1-hour). By Benjamin Grosof. Invited keynote talk presented at The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications Orlando, Florida, October 31, 2008.
  You can also get the abstract of the talk.
  Comment: Additional material, esp. about applications and more KR features, is available in the 6-hours rules tutorial from ISWC-2006.

2007:

• "The New Rules of Business: Semantic Web as Disruptive Innovation" (50-min). By Benjamin Grosof. Invited talk presented at 6th European Business Rules Conference (EBRC-2007), Dusseldorf, Germany, June 19, 2007.
  You can also get the abstract of the talk.

• "Commercializing Semantic Web: Rules, Services, and Roadmapping" (1-hour). By Benjamin Grosof. Invited talk presented at 1st European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC-2007), Vienna, Austria, June 1, 2007.

  2006:

• ****FULL TUTORIAL SLIDESET****
  Conference Tutorial "Semantic Web Rules with Ontologies, and their E-Service Applications" (one slide per page, suitable for viewing on computer display). By Benjamin Grosof and Mike Dean. Full-day conference Tutorial (6 hours) presented at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2006), held Athens, Georgia, USA, Nov. 5, 2006. Presented by Benjamin Grosof and Mike Dean.
  You can also get:
  • printable version with two slides per page of full tutorial slideset (recommended for printing so as to produce more compact hard copy)
  • printable version with six slides per page of full tutorial slideset (recommended for printing so as to produce even more compact hard copy)
  
  Comment: This is an updated version of the WWW-2006 Tutorial.
  Gives an overview of our research, as well as a survey of the field, on semantic web rules knowledge representation and standards including RuleML and SWRL, how rules combine with ontologies, implementation techniques and available tools including SweetRules (presentation included demo too); and e-business applications including e-contracting, semantic integration, business and security policies, and financial information integration.
  Includes extensive introduction to relevant logical rules knowledge representation concepts and theory.
  This is an updated version of the ISWC-2005 Tutorial.
  It has more on rules, and less on e-commerce applications, than the EC-04 Tutorial.
  It is longer than the WWW-2006 Tutorial.
  The SweetRules overview is less detailed than the June 2005 SweetRules Overview.

• ****FULL TUTORIAL SLIDESET****
  Conference Tutorial "Semantic Web Rules with Ontologies, and their E-Service Applications" (one slide per page, suitable for viewing on computer display). By Benjamin Grosof and Mike Dean. Half-day conference Tutorial (3 hours) presented at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW-2006), held Edinburgh, Scotland, May 26, 2006. Presented by Benjamin Grosof and Mike Dean.
  You can also get:
  • Tutorial description
  • printable version with two slides per page of full tutorial slideset (recommended for printing so as to produce more compact hard copy)
  • printable version with six slides per page of full tutorial slideset (recommended for printing so as to produce even more compact hard copy)
  
  Comment: See instead the ISWC-2006 Tutorial for an updated version.
  Gives an overview of our research, as well as a survey of the field, on semantic web rules knowledge representation and standards including RuleML and SWRL, how rules combine with ontologies, implementation techniques and available tools including SweetRules (presentation included demo too); and e-business applications including e-contracting, semantic integration, business and security policies, and financial information integration.
  Includes extensive introduction to relevant logical rules knowledge representation concepts and theory.
  This is an updated version of the ISWC-2005 Tutorial.
  It has more on rules, and less on e-commerce applications, than the EC-04 Tutorial.
  It is shorter than the ISWC-2006 Tutorial.
  The SweetRules overview is less detailed than the June 2005 SweetRules Overview.

• "The Production Logic Programs Approach: KR Foundations for Semantic Rules on the Web" (1-hour). By Benjamin Grosof. Invited talk presented at Stanford University Semantic Web Seminar, Stanford, CA, USA, Mar. 29, 2006.
  You can also get the abstract of the talk.

• "Rule-based Semantic Services: Leveraging Knowledge Representation to Automate Business Processes" (1-hour). By Benjamin Grosof. Invited talk presented at IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, USA, Jan. 30, 2006.
  You can also get the abstract of the talk.

  2005:

• "Semantic Rules for Policies and Services on the Web: Techniques, Applications, and Standards" (1-hour). By Benjamin Grosof. Invited talk presented at (alphabetically):
  • Google Labs, Mountain View, CA, USA, Dec. 12, 2005.
  • IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, USA, Dec. 13, 2005.
  • Oracle Corp. headquarters, database seminar, Dec. 7, 2005, Redwood City, CA, USA (originally, a slightly earlier version).
  You can also get the abstract of the talk.

• "Some Key Concepts and History for Semantically Interoperable Rules" (30-min.). By Benjamin Grosof. Invited talk at W3C Rule Interchange Format Working Group Kickoff Face-to-Face Meeting, held Dec. 8-9, 2005, Burlingame, CA, USA.

• "Representing Ontologies and Combining them with Rules, for Semantic Policies and Services on the Web" (1-hour). By Benjamin Grosof. Invited talk at SRI International, Artificial Intelligence Center, Dec. 6, 2005, Menlo Park, CA, USA.

• Conference Poster "Overview of SweetRules V2.1: Tools for Semantic Web Rules with Ontologies, including Translation, Inferencing, Analysis, and Authoring" (15-min.). By Benjamin Grosof and Mike Dean. Invited conference poster presentation (15 minutes) at the International Conference on Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web (RuleML-2005), held Galway, Ireland, Nov. 10-12, 2005. Presented by Benjamin Grosof.

• ****FULL TUTORIAL SLIDESET****
  Conference Tutorial "Semantic Web Rules with Ontologies, and their E-Service Applications" (one slide per page, suitable for viewing on computer display). By Benjamin Grosof and Mike Dean. Half-day conference Tutorial (3.5 hours) presented at the 4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2005), held Galway, Ireland, Nov. 6, 2005. Presented by Benjamin Grosof and Mike Dean.
  You can also get:
  • Tutorial description
  • printable version of full tutorial slideset (two slides per page, recommended for printing so as to produce more compact hard copy)
  
  Comment: See instead the ISWC-2006 Tutorial, which is an updated version.
  Gives an overview of our research, as well as a survey of the field, on semantic web rules knowledge representation and standards including RuleML and SWRL, how rules combine with ontologies, implementation techniques and available tools including SweetRules (presentation included demo too); and e-business applications including e-contracting, semantic integration, business and security policies, and financial information integration.
  Includes extensive introduction to relevant logical rules knowledge representation concepts and theory.
  More on rules, and less on e-commerce applications, than the EC-04 Tutorial.
  The SweetRules overview is less detailed than the Winter 2004 SweetRules Overview.

• "Overview of SweetRules V2.1: Tools for Semantic Web Rules and Ontologies, including Translation, Inferencing, Analysis, and Authoring" (1.2-hour), presented as part of a half-day rules tutorial at the WSMO Semantic Web Services Week, June 7, 2005, Innsbruck, Austria. Updated from earlier verison presented at the Winter 2004 DAML PI Meeting. By Benjamin Grosof and Mmike Dean.
  Comment: An overview for a broad, somewhat technical, but non-researcher IT audience of CTOs/CIOs/architects/strategists/developers.

• "The Thinking Internet -- How the Semantic Web Will Transform Business" (45-min.), at the 2005 MIT Information Technology Conference -- "IT Innovation: Emerging Priorities" -- organized by the MIT Industrial Liasion Program, Cambridge, MA, Apr. 20, 2005. By Benjamin Grosof.
  Comment: An overview for a broad, somewhat technical, but non-researcher IT audience of CTOs/CIOs/architects/strategists/developers.

  2004:

• "SweetPH: Using the Process Handbook for Semantic Web Services" (45-min.), at SWSL Meeting, held Hawthorne, NY, Dec. 9-10, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof and Abraham Bernstein.
  Comment: For more about strategy and context of SweetPH, see the SWSL talk about SweetPH.
  SWSL stands for "Semantic Web Services Language", a work product of the Language Committee of the Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI) that coordinates SWS emerging standards and research world-wide. The SWSL Face-to-Face Meeting (F2F) is a workshop, held approximately twice a year.

• "E-Services Knowledge Management on the New Generation Web: Rules, E-Contracting, and Business Process Automation" (1-hour), at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, Dec. 8, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof.
  You can also see the abstract.
  Comment: A broad overview.

• "Overview of SweetRules V2.0: Tools for Semantic Web Rules and Ontologies, including Translation, Inferencing, Analysis, and Authoring" (1.2-hour), at Winter 2004 DAML PI Meeting (DARPA Agent Markup Language program's Principal Investigators Meeting), held San Antonio, TX, Nov. 30 - Dec. 2, 2004. By Benjamin N. Grosof and Mike Dean.
  Comment: See later versions of SweetRules overviews for more up-to-date versions.
  Gives detailed overview of SweetRules V2 (presentation included demos too).
  DAML PI Meetings are twice-yearly invited research workshops with approximately 100+ participants.
  More detailed and up to date than the previous SweetRules overviews, e.g., the WWW-2004 DevDay and ISWC-2004 Tutorial talks.

• "DAML Rules Report", including: "SWSI Rules: Update"; "RuleML, SWRL, and FOL: Update"; "Next Steps in Standardization", and "Overview of SweetRules V2.0" (incl. demos, SweetDeal); (2-hour), at Winter 2004 DAML PI Meeting (DARPA Agent Markup Language program's Principal Investigators Meeting), held San Antonio, TX, Nov. 30 - Dec. 2, 2004. By Benjamin N. Grosof and Mike Dean.
  Comment: DAML PI Meetings are twice-yearly invited research workshops with approximately 100+ participants.
  The "Overview of SweetRules V2.0" section of this talk is provided above as a separate talk item.

• ****FULL TUTORIAL SLIDESET****
  Conference Tutorial "Semantic Web Rules with Ontologies, and their E-Business Applications" (3.5-hour), at the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2004), held Hiroshima, Japan, Nov. 7-11, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof and Mike Dean. You can also see the tutorial abstract.
  Comment: See instead the ISWC-2006 Tutorial, which is an updated version although with a bit different applications focus.
  Gives an overview of our research, as well as a survey of the field, on semantic web rules knowledge representation and standards including RuleML and SWRL, how rules combine with ontologies, implementation techniques and available tools including SweetRules (presentation included demo too); and e-business applications including e-contracting, semantic integration, business and security policies, and financial information integration.
  Includes extensive introduction to relevant logical rules knowledge representation concepts and theory.
  More on rules, and less on e-commerce applications, than the EC-04 Tutorial.
  The SweetRules overview is less detailed and up-to-date than the Winter 2004 SweetRules Overview.

• "Combining Semantic Web Rules with Ontologies: New KR Theory and Tools" (1-hour), at Workshop on Principles and Practice of Semantic Web Reasoning (PPSWR04), held Saint-Malo, France, Sept. 8, 2004. By Benjamin N. Grosof.
  Comment: PPSWR04 was sponsored largely by REWERSE, the European Union's Network of Excellence on web reasoning, including rules. I helped found REWERSE.
  • Slightly expanded version of just the portion of the above talk that is on hypermonotonic reasoning is the next entry:
• "Hypermonotonic Reasoning: Unifying Nonmonotonic Logic Programs with First Order Logic" (15-min.) (2004-10-19). Slightly expanded section of the PPSWR04 talk. By Benjamin N. Grosof.

• "Rules Knowledge Representation for Privacy Policies: RuleML, Semantic Web Services, and their Research Frontiers" (30-min.), at PORTIA Workshop on Sensitive Data in Medical, Financial, and Content-Distribution Systems, held Stanford, CA, Jul. 8-9, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof; delivered by Joan Feigenbaum.
  Comment: Portia is a $12Million NSF-sponsored research project on confidentiality and privacy. The event was essentially its kickoff workshop.

• "DAML Rules Report", including: "Usage Comments about SWRL"; "SWSI Rules"; "Implementing SWRL"; and "Research Directions"; (1.5-hour), at Winter 2004 DAML PI Meeting (DARPA Agent Markup Language program's Principal Investigators Meeting), held New York City, May 25-26, 2004. By Benjamin N. Grosof.
  Comment: DAML PI Meetings are twice-yearly invited research workshops with approximately 100+ participants.

• "ROSE: Rules and Ontologies for Web SErvices" (1-hour), at SWSL Meeting, held New York City, May 23-24, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof.
  Comment: Gives a technical strategic analysis and proposal ("strawman"), which was then essentially adopted at the Meeting, for SWSL's then-future direction.
  SWSL stands for "Semantic Web Services Language", a work product of the Language Committee of the Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI) that coordinates SWS emerging standards and research world-wide. The SWSL Face-to-Face Meeting (F2F) is a workshop, held approximately twice a year.

• "Trust Policies using Rules, with Applications in Financial Services" (30-min.), at: WWW-2004 Developers Day Rules on the Web track (a workshop held as part of the conference), 13th Intl. Conf. on the World Wide Web (WWW-2004), held New York City, May 17-22, 2004. By Benjamin N. Grosof, Chitravanu Neogy, and Said Tabet.

• "SweetRules: Tools for RuleML Inferencing and Translation" (15-min.), at: WWW-2004 Developers Day Rules on the Web track (a workshop held as part of the conference), 13th Intl. Conf. on the World Wide Web (WWW-2004), held New York City, May 2004. By Benjamin N. Grosof.
  Comments: See instead the Winter 2004 SweetRules Overview which is more up-to-date and detailed.

• "Remarks on Semantic Web Services and Rules for ... Processes, Protocols, and Policies" (10-min.), at: Panel on "Mind Your P's: Processes, Protocols, and Policies", part of 13th Intl. Conf. on the World Wide Web (WWW-2004), held New York City, May 17-22, 2004. Panelist presentation. By Benjamin Grosof.

• ***FULL TUTORIAL SLIDESET***
  Conference Tutorial "Semantic Web Services for E-Commerce Applications" (3.5-hour), at the 2004 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC-04), held New York City, May 17-20, 2004. By Benjamin N. Grosof.
  Comment: Gives an overview of our research, as well as survey of the field, on semantic web services, rules, e-contracting, other e-commerce policies, and financial information integration. More on e-commerce applications, and less on rules, than the ISWC-2004 Tutorial.

• "Research Directions for Policies and Compliance in Financial Services: Leveraging Semantic Web and Web Services" (30-min.), at Center for eBusiness @ MIT Annual Conference, held Cambridge, MA, May 18-19, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof.
  The Center for eBusiness @ MIT is a very large research center involving dozens of faculty and projects. Its Annual Conference is attended by 100+ participants, mostly from (non-MIT) sponsor organizations.

• "E-Services Management on the New Generation Web: End-to-End Contracting and Business Process Automation" (1-hour), at Harvard University Econ/CS Seminar, Cambridge, MA, May 4, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof.
  You can also see the abstract.
  

• "E-Services on the New Generation Web: Automating Business Process Management" (1-hour), at Center for eBusiness @ MIT Lunch Seminar, Cambridge, MA, April 14, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof.
  You can also see a shorter "highlights" version (10-min.) of the talk.
  Comment: mainly about SweetPH, the Process Handbook, and their relationship to Semantic Web Services. Emphasizes strategy and context more, and technical approach less, than the SWSL talk about SweetPH.

• "Semantic Web Services, Rules, and E-Contracting: Overview and Relationship to AutoID" (45-min.), at AutoID Labs Web Services WAN SIG Launch Workshop, Cambridge, MA, Mar. 9, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof.
  Comment: The portion specifically about AutoID is especially slides 26-29, 31.

• "Emerging Web Platforms: Semantic Web Services for E-Commerce and EAI" (10-min.). Panel chair presentation. At the 9th Annual Cyberposium conference, held Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA, Jan. 16-17, 2004. By Benjamin Grosof.
  You can see the panel handout (1-page) as well as the panel flyer (half-page).
  Comment: Cyberposium is a technology innovation and entrepreneurship event, not a research conference.

  2003:

• "Semantic Web Services, Rules, and E-Contracting", slides of Harvard University seminar talk, at Harvard University Information Technology & Management Seminar series, Oct. 2, 2003. You can also get the talk abstract (in plaintext). By Benjamin N. Grosof.
  Comment: Gives an overview of our work on semantic web services, rules, and e-contracting.

• "Directions in Semantic Web Services", slides of MIT seminar talk, at MIT's CISR (Center for Information Systems Research) lunch seminar series, May 5, 2003. You can also get the talk abstract (in plaintext). By Benjamin N. Grosof.
  Comment: Gives an updated overview of our work in Semantic Web Services (SWS), focusing on three new areas of fundamental theory for rules. How rules and ontologies can be usefully and feasibly combined for Semantic Web Services (SWS), including for e-contracting. The overview of SWS is briefer but more up to date than in the Nov. 20, 2002 Center for eBusiness talk or the Dec. 6, 2002 U. Maryland talk (below).

• "DAML Rules Update and Issues", slides of invited talk, which was the main presentation at the Rules portion of the DAML PI (Principal Investgators) Meeting, held Miami, FL, USA, April 8-10, 2003. That Rules portion comprised three sessions, totaling 5 hours: a main breakout (April 9), preceded by a primer (April 8), and followed by an outbrief (April 10). The overall presentation includes several other files as well: "Summary of RuleML Working Note: April 08, 2003 draft version"; "RuleML Abstract Syntax Specification: Excerpts from March 28, 2003 draft version"; and "Optional Slides". All of the preceding are by Benjamin N. Grosof. Additional related materials from the rules breakout include: Stefan Decker's presentation on rules use cases and requirements; the rules breakout's agenda; and notes from the rules breakout discussion.

  2002:

• "Rules + Ontologies for Semantic Web Services", slides of U. Maryland seminar talk, Dec. 6, 2002. (Similar talk was presented at MIT COIN group seminar on Dec. 4, 2002.) You can also get the talk abstract (in plaintext). By Benjamin N. Grosof.
  Comment: How rules and ontologies can be usefully and feasibly combined for Semantic Web Services (SWS), including for e-contracting. The overview of SWS is briefer than in the Nov. 20, 2002 Center for eBusiness talk (below), but the overview of RuleML in SWS, and the treatment of e-contracting, is more detailed than there.

• "Semantic Web Rules for Web Services", slides of MIT seminar talk. You can also get the talk abstract (in plaintext). By Benjamin N. Grosof. Presented at the Center for eBusiness @ MIT research Lunch Seminar, held Nov. 20, 2002.
  Comment: An overview of Semantic Web, the emerging concept of Semantic Web Services, and the use of rules in them, e.g., for e-contracting.

• "Introduction to RuleML", slides of teleconference talk. With also "Part 2 of 2: Additional Optional Slides", plus "RuleML Intro Examples and More Syntax Details" By Benjamin N. Grosof and Harold Boley. Presented at the Joint US/EU ad hoc Agent Markup Language Committee ("Joint Committee") teleconference meeting, held Oct. 29, 2002.
  Comment: This is currently the most up to date presentation about RuleML approach, status and plans.

• "Rules and DAML", slides of invited talk. Subtitled: "Description Logic Programs, Rule-based Semantic Web Services, their Application Scenarios; and RuleML Update". By Benjamin N. Grosof. Presented at the DAML Program's Principal Investigator Meeting, held Portland, OR, USA, Oct. 17, 2002. (Listed on that site as "Joint Committee Rules" session; available there)
  Comment: also relevant are two other associated presentations from that PI Meeting (also available at that site):
  
  • "DAML Rules Phase II". By Benjamin N. Grosof. This was the action items report of the Rules Breakout session, together with more overview of RuleML.
  • "Services Breakout: Expressiveness Challenges and Industry Trends". This was the report of the Services and Rules Breakout session, including action items largely for the DAML-Services Coalition ("DC" in the slides"). By David L. Martin, Sheila McIlraith, and Benjamin N. Grosof.

• "RuleML Status and Plans -- Overview", slides of invited talk. By Harold Boley, Benjamin N. Grosof, Said Tabet, Steve Ross-Talbot, and Gerd Wagner (NB: author sequence is alphabetic). Presented at the International Workshop on Rule Markup Languages for Business Rules on the Semantic Web held 14 June 2002, Sardinia (Italy) in conjunction with the First International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2002).

• "What's My Deal?: Contract Communications in XML Agent Marketplaces", slides of invited talk. By Benjamin N. Grosof. Presented at the Center for eBusiness@MIT's Annual Conference, held Cambridge, MA, USA, April 17-19, 2002. Also to be available from that website. Comment: Describes SweetDeal, our approach to XML rule-based e-contracting, which uses our SweetRules prototype of RuleML, the emerging industry standards for Semantic Web rules.

• "Automated Contracting Among XML Agents", slides of invited talk. By Benjamin N. Grosof. Presented at the American Bar Association (ABA) Business Law Section's Spring Meeting, held Boston, MA, USA, April 5, 2002. This was under the ABA's Cyberlaw Committee, E-Commerce Subcommittee, Electronic Contracting Practices Workgroup. Also to be available from the ABA website.

  2001:

• "Standardizing XML Rules: Rules for E-Business on the Semantic Web", 45-minute Invited Talk (talk slides in pdf). By Benjamin N. Grosof. Presented at the Workshop on E-business and the Intelligent Web at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-01), on Aug. 5, 2001. You can also see the short paper (in pdf; or in postscript) -- this is a 2-pager preliminary prose outline of the talk, and appears in the Workshop Proceedings.
  Comments: The talk slides are more up to date and more detailed, but the paper is complementary to the slides. They both largely discuss Rule Markup Language (RuleML).

• Conference Tutorial "Agent Communication in Knowledge Based Electronic Markets" (3.5-hour) , at the 2001 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-01), held Seattle, WA, USA, on Aug. 5, 2001. By Benjamin Grosof and Yannis Labrou. You can see a detailed or a brief version of the tutorial description (with speaker bios).

• "Automating Law in the Small: Contracts, Regulations, and Prioritized Argumentation", 1-hour Invited Address (talk slides in pdf or in postscript; you can also get the talk abstract). By Benjamin N. Grosof. Presented at the 2001 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL-2001), held Washington University Law School, St. Louis, MO, USA, May 21-25, 2001.

• "Rules for the Semantic Web", W3C Team Meeting, held Cambridge, MA, Mar. 29, 2001.
  Largely about RuleML

• "Rule-based Technology for Automating Contracting by Agents", slides of invited talk. By Benjamin N. Grosof. Presented at the American Bar Association (ABA) Business Law Section's Spring Meeting 3/22-25/01, held Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Mar. 22-25, 2001. This was under the ABA's Cyberlaw Committee (Internet Law Subcommittee, E-Agents Task Force). Also to be available from the ABA website.

• "Overview of RuleML", (with Harold Boley and Said Tabet), a Birds Of a Feather session of the W3C face-to-face Technical Plenary Meeting, held Cambridge, MA, Feb. 26, 2001.

  2000:

• "Contracts, Policies, and Prioritized Rules in XML Agent Communication", slides of invited talk (in pdf; or in postscript). By Benjamin N. Grosof. Presented at the 18th meeting of FIPA, held UMBC Technology Center, Baltimore, MD, USA, July 19, 2000. Also available from the FIPA website.
  Comment: FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) is a leading industry standards body for intelligent software agents, esp. their communication.

Software:

• Flora-2 (2008-), is an open source rule system that supports highly expressive yet scalable declarative knowledge representation (KR). SILK relied on Flora-2 as its core (KR) reasoning engine. Flora-2 supports most of Rulelog, although it lacks the full omniformity expressive feature.
• SILK: The SILK effort (Semantic Inferencing on Large Knowledge; 2008-2013) was part of Vulcan Inc.'s Project Halo. The SILK effort aimed to provide key infrastructure for widely-authored VLKBs (Very Large Knowledge Bases) for business and science that answer questions, proactively supply information, and reason powerfully. The SILK system it developed supports Rulelog, with components for reasoning, web knowledge interchange, and collaborative knowledge acquisition.
• Rulelog is a fully semantic rule logic that extends, and transforms into, extends declarative logic programs (LP). Rulelog supports defeasible higher order logic formulas. Rulelog newly synergizes several major strands of pure-research progress in KR based on extensions of LP. LP is the core KR of RuleML and Rule Interchange Format (RIF) as well as of databases (SQL, XQuery, and SPARQL) and most commercial implementations of OWL ontologies. Rulelog adds: prioritized defaults cf. courteous and Defeasible Logic; higher-order and frames cf. F-Logic; bounded rationality cf. restraint; tight integration of weakened full classical logic (including OWL); actions and events cf. production rules, Event-Condition-Action rules, and Situated/Production LP.

  The SILK approach has the potential to effectively interchange and integrate a high percentage of the world's structured knowledge starting from today's legacy forms. "SILK" stands for "Semantic Inferencing on Large Knowledge", what the next generation Web will be spun from.

  Status: SILK V1 has been completed, and its reasoning engine is being used within the Vulcan Project Halo team. SILK V2 is under development.

  For more info, see:

  • talks and papers about SILK on this website; and
  • the SILK system project site.

Vulcan Inc.'s Project Halo includes also AURA and SMW+.

• AURA (2004-) is a system for knowledge base authoring and question-answering in college-level sciences. It is part of Vulcan Inc.'s Project Halo.
• SMW+ (2007-), i.e., the Halo extension of Semantic MediaWiki, is a system for semantic wikis that extends the software that Wikipedia runs on. It is part of Vulcan Inc.'s Project Halo.
• SweetRules (released 2005) is a first-of-a-kind open source platform for semantic web business rules
  • SweetRules (2001-) is a uniquely powerful integrated set of tools for semantic web rules and ontologies, including translation, inferencing, analysis, and authoring. V2.0 was released in Dec. 2004 on SemWebCentral, the premier open source software repository and website for the semantic web R&D community. SweetRules' pluggability and composition capabilities enable new components to be added relatively quickly. Implemented in Java, SweetRules has a compact codebase (~20K lines of code total for several dozen tools). Hundreds of users have already downloaded it, inspired in part by its well-received demonstrations in detailed presentations at the DAML Principal Investigators Meeting and the International Semantic Web Conference tutorial program. See the SweetRules website for more info and the downloadable.

  • "Semantic Web Enabling Technology (SWEET)". SWEET ("Semantic WEb Enabling Technology") is an overall set of tools that Benjamin Grosof's group (with collaborators) has been developing since 2001.

• SweetDeal (2002-) is an e-contracting system for specifying, communicating, negotiating, executing, and monitoring rule-based e-contracts.
  • SweetDeal uses SweetRules. SweetDeal is described in the 2004 IJEC paper and several other papers and talks. It was most recently demonstrated at the Winter 2004 DAML PI Meeting.
    A user-downloadable version is in progress.

• SweetPH (2003-) is a system for translating structured business process ontology knowledge from the MIT Process Handbook into interoperably shareable semantic web form -- specifically, into RuleML.
  • SweetPH uses SweetRules. It is described in:
    • an invited talk at Center for eBusiness @ MIT Research Seminar;
    • the working paper Beyond Monotonic Inheritance; and
    • an invited talk at the 2004 Semantic Web Services Language Meeting (where it was demonstrated).
    Growing out of the work on SweetPH, the Process Handbook is discussed at several points in the
    • Semantic Web Services Framework (SWSF), especially in the SWSF Application Scenarios.
    The SweetPH approach is described there in the application scenario on
    • "Using Defaults in Domain-Specific Service Ontologies"
  SweetPH is also described more briefly in several others of our recent invited talks.

  An open source release of the SweetPH software is in preparation, to be released probably in summer 2006.