I will be at the RuleML conference again this year. Last year was a great event with lots of good presentations and knowledge sharing. While the conference is organised by the RuleML group it is not specific to the RuleML standard and various standards and technologies are discussed at this event - which is what makes it so important.

As always these things can't happen without funding. This year Red Hat will be a RuleML sponsor and I strongly encourage others to help sponsor this fantastic event. Sponsorship starts from as little as $500 for Bronze. You can view the pdf detailing these sponsorship packages here http://www.athico.com/ruleml/Sponsorship%20Package%202008.pdf.

International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications

The 2008 International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications, RuleML-2008 (http://2008.ruleml.org), is the primary industrial-oriented meeting place to discuss the applicability and commercialisation of web rule technologies for enterprises and public organizations. At this, RuleML-2008 addresses users, system providers, practitioners, developers and researchers as well as representatives of rule/event standardization efforts and open source rule communities. After last year's highly successful RuleML-2007 (http://2007.ruleml.org), RuleML-2008 again joins the established, practically oriented Business Rules Forum (http://www.businessrulesforum.com) to help cross-fertilizing between Web and Business Logic technology.

The symposium will be again held in Orlando, Florida, US, October 30/31, 2008. Participants will be offered an exciting venue to exchange new ideas, practical developments and experiences on issues related to the engineering, management, integration, interoperation and interchange of rules in open distributed environments such as the Web. RuleML-2008 will enable delegates to better understand web rules and event processing technologies and their potential, and how to exploit these technologies in their organizations

The RuleML-2008 highlights will include:

Plenary keynotes and a panel discussion featuring prominent and visionary speakers.
A RuleML-2008 Challenge with prizes to demonstrate tools, use cases, and applications.
Scientific research, industry, and demo papers and presentations advancing and assessing the state of the art in event and rule-based systems selected in a peer-reviewed fashion by an international program committee.
Invited talks given by world-class scientists and industrials featuring conceptual topics on event and rule-based computing and industry success stories.
Social events to promote networking among the symposium delegates in an informal setting.

The RuleML-2008 Challenge with prestigious prizes provides an excellent opportunity to showcase your organization and become associated with this innovation driven technology market, characterized by strong market growth, visibility and commercial opportunities.
To share your ideas, results and experiences, and to learn more about rules technology, RuleML-2008 invites all of you, including:

IT Services, Rules and Event Processing system providers
Representatives of, and participants in, rule standardization efforts
Members of open source rules communities
CTOs and Strategists of technology firms
Information Architects and Strategic Technology Planners
CIOs and Information Technology Managers
Venture Capitalists and Investors
CEOs of software start-ups
Product Managers from software and hardware companies
Data Analysts from major public and private organizations
Academics and Researchers
Software Developers
Press and Analysts
Technology Consultants

For further details please see the Symposium website http://2008.ruleml.org/.
For more information please contact: ruleml2008@easychair.org.