Two great pieces of news from the Drools team: Mark Proctor to join RuleML as a Director and US Navy and OSDE community involvement.
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Mark Proctor has been invited to join RuleML as a director, to which he has graciously accepted. RuleML is best known for its work in relation to standards, both the RuleML standards and W3C’s RIF standard. However the remit of the RuleML group extends much further than this, as was seen at this year’s RuleML Symposium. RuleML is more than just rule standards, its interests cover a wide variety of topics from event processing to the semantic web and it is a working group for general logic based collaboration and knowledge sharing. The Symposium event is in itself a great opportunity for researchers and engineers to meet and discuss the future, as well as listen to other leaders in the field. While other conferences have shrunk in size, it was good to see RuleML continue to grow again this year and it’s always a pleasure to see students giving Drools related talks. RuleML along with the October Rules Festival are leading the way for research and engineering related events.
At the same time we are pleased to announce that the Drools team will be tripling its core community size from 5 to 15 developers thanks to development projects within the Department of Defense and OSDE (Argentina’s largest healthcare organisation). A US Navy lead Clinical Decision Support research effort will be coordinating the work of its 5 full time developers with those of the core Drools team. OSDE will similarly align 4 full time and two part time (50%) developers. All members have the common goal of building the ultimate in Enterprise Decision Management and Business Automation; their commitment to community coordination is appreciated.
The coordinated work will focus on building enterprise tooling and capabilities with Mark Proctor providing subject matter expertise. The continued work of unifying and integrating rules, workflow and event processing for seamless use will remain a central tenet for all aspects of the development. Activities include extending existing authoring metaphors, adding powerful templating capabilities and meta authoring features, building sophisticated deployment and runtime management systems, enhancing the existing WS-HT based human task system for the demanding needs of the healthcare industry and completing the current BPMN2 solution. There will also be a focus of work around grid, cloud and interactive debugging, simulating and testing.
Healthcare is a demanding industry that often rides the cutting edge of technology. The recent advances of Drools, which brings fully unified and integrated workflow and event processing capabilities to the table, with our already powerful rule engine, positions Drools as a disruptive and enabling piece of technology for the Healthcare industry. In support of this and in true Open Source tradition of “We can do more when we work together” we are pleased to welcome these new community members.
For the Drools team, and the entire community involved in our project, things have never been more interesting and the future never looked so bright.
Sponsoring community involvement is one of the best ways to take control of your IT investment and get a great ROI, with the accelerated results in Drools helping you to build a more flexible and agile business. If you would like to follow in the footsteps of OSDE and the US Navy and get involved, please don’t hesitate to contact me – mproctor at codehaus d0t org.
Mark Proctor
Drools Project and Community Lead.
