2009/2/24 Andrew Waterman <andrew.waterman@gmail.com>
Hi Jean-Marc,

Are you using the template functionality in Drools 5.0 for OWL?  We use Drools for expressing models/games down here and I have been looking for an approach that would provide a more generic way of defining data-models and rules that act on them.

No, you probably understood that I'm using from Drools "just" the inference engine, and provide a different interface to it through the N3, RDF and OWL inputs.

That being said, I had a look at template and I see common feature with what I do, namely that :
"Decision tables also provide a degree of insulation from the underlying object model"

which is very much the case with N3 rules. With N3 rules, you only really care to define classes if you want to reason on classes themselves as data, or if you want to reason on inheritance, or generic properties like transitivity , etc .

 Also, I wonder if you've looked at Miles Parker's MetaScape ABM modeling plugin for Eclipse.  It's  a different area, but he has put together a very nice visual way of working with both models (data) and actions (rules).  

I'll download and test it, but this is an approach based on eclipse and EMF, like ATL, QVT and other stuff, which are interesting. And I've been working 2 years in a software company for an EMF like UML architecture, so I know what I am talking about.
But I believe in the future of Logic and AI - based approches, as much independent on infrastuctures as possible. And eclipse is definitely not a light-weight infrastructure.
My goal with EulerGUI, and the larger project Deductions (http://deductions.sourceforge.net/) is to be able to generate (to infer) as much as possible of an application, on several platforms.

--
Jean-Marc Vanel
http://jmvanel.free.fr/