Languages and Tools for Rule Modeling
Grzegorz Jacek Nalepa · IGI Global eBooks · 2009
This chapter presents selected practical issues of rule modeling. This field combines both classic artificial intelligence methods and software engineering. The chapter gives a concise presentation of selected relevant methods, and approaches, put in an engineering perspective. The modeling language used in the communication between business analysts and experts for analyzing the system requirements should not be too technical. It should allow for visual rule expressions, which can be understood by experts without an extensive technical training. The main goals of this chapter are: to summarize the formal foundations of rules found in the field of AI, including decision tables and trees; discuss main challenges in practical rule design, and modeling; introduce selected recent research in the field of rule design, focusing on visual modeling; and observe some important future trends in rule design and integration. In the chapter it is argued that efficient visual rule modeling methods are crucial for developing complex rule systems.