With the latest release of our business rules management platform Visual Rules 6.0, we switched the underlying system architecture to complete tenant-awareness. Sounds pretty neat. But what does this imply? Why did we decide for multitenancy support? Please go on reading to learn more about it. Read more…
At Bosch Software Innovations, we have added some interesting new customers including Green Charge Networks and Prosper. In addition to many other projects, these development shows how Visual Rules modeling approach can solve complex challenges in our Big Data, customer-focused social ecosystem.
Fitness appliances through ordinary Smartphones: Sensors provide detailed data (© Dan Race – Fotolia.com)
From our discussions on the internet of things ( and here) and other developments, we know that today’s world of mobile-networked-social-media presents new opportunities for business models and customer engagement. Example models include freemium, where a service is provided free of charge, but a premium is charged for advanced features. Another style is gamification, where game thinking is applied to non-game applications to encourage people to adopt them. These seemingly simple, yet powerful concepts often require deep layers of implemented business logic.
This ecosystem is also being extended by sensors and edge devices in the IoT. For instance, heart monitors provide data to doctors, or fitness appliances through ordinary smart phones. Sensors, e.g. on bicycles provide detailed data. These products are a visible outgrowth of the internet of things and services (IoT). Yet, to create applications one must leverage the extreme granularity of this.
Certainly, the global business, economic and political environment is volatile. Ongoing events and elevated risks in finance, energy and the environment are commonplace. Corporation and government have responded by focusing on sustainability strategies. Simply put, sustainability is the capacity to endure. The sustainability movement focuses on corporate and government practices that are risk aware and supportive. Many of the topics Bosch Software Innovations is involved in are related to sustainability. Indirectly, the sustainability movement is about processes and systems that can endure changes in basic assumptions. Solutions in the Internet of Things and Services (IoT) are a substantial aspect of this. For instance, transportation systems must continue to operate in the absence of diesel or gasoline. Factories might need to operate in an environment of unstable electrical power. One aim of the sustainability movement is to create agile responses to the events and conditions of this volatile environment.
During the past few months, we conducted a number of pretty interesting workshops with the Data Mining experts form Bosch Corporate Research. We discussed with them in what way data-driven and rule-based approaches complement each other. You find some of our considerations in the following.
Admittedly, the starting point of our discussion (i.e. ideas that I came up some years ago) was rather fragmentary. I am a Computational Linguist and these folks are pretty much comfortable with data-driven methods. So when I started to work with Bosch Software Innovations, honestly speaking, I was surprised to find that people would model a classifier by hand, while they could run a Data Mining toolkit to automatically train one. After a lot of thinking and discussing, I back then answered the question “When to use what approach?” as follows: Business Rules are best suited for explicit knowledge, while Data Mining is best suited for implicit knowledge. Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? Alas, that’s only half the story.
Cooking: Explicit Knowledge
The distinction between explicit and implicit was established in the 1960s by M. Polanyi. It means that some knowledge can be encoded in terms of for instance texts, figures, or formulas and can thus be communicated, while some knowledge is kind of tacit, that is to say, it is part of a person’s skills but cannot be communicated. Have a look at the pictures: How to cook a certain meal can be communicated with a recipe or a sequence of photos. Read more…
When I joined Bosch Software Innovations some years ago, one of my first projects was the analysis of a fancy fire detection scenario, which was intended to guide the development of the Visual Rules State Flow (a state diagram using transition rules modeled with Visual Rules). I still remember myself standing in front of a whiteboard, lively discussing the scenario with Markus and Mike, who tried to scribble the stuff that we came up and subsequently discarded. Time passed and the State Flow grew from toddler to promising juvenile. While it has been and still is pretty much underestimated, we finally have the opportunity to show its potential in an Industrial-IT showcase. Currently, we develop this showcase, which is supposed to look eventually as illustrated below, with a bunch of illustrious partners, among others Stäubli (who provide a 6-axis robot), SICK (who provide an image-based code reader), and HP (who provide the server).
One major goal of the Internet of Things and Services (IoT) is the connection and interaction of systems and things. Formerly, most of those things were offline and not able to play a role in a networked world. Now, those kind of connected systems provide users added value by supplying services across domain boundaries, e.g. telemedicine, energy, mobility, smart homes. By integrating systems and things in this exciting, networked world, not only new stakeholders come into play, but also the number of situations grows immensely. Read more…
Internet of things topics are spreading in the blogosphere. This particular blog is a manifest. But only in the blogosphere? No, not at all. We will also present a lot of different perspectives on it at various events this year. One of the events is the CeBIT 2012 in Hannover/Germany. There will be a series of presentations at our booth, which I would like to introduce to you, briefly.
I am very happy to announce the newest release of our Visual Rules Suite today!
The Visual Rules Suite offers tools and platforms to create agile enterprise applications, which make business processes quickly adaptable. The core component of the suite is a business rules management platform.
Two new studies regarding Business Rules Platforms have been released only recently: one study presents the current situation on the market and the other forecasts two future business rules trends.
Our Visual Rules Suite was part of the reviews. As a result of the briefings, the analysts highlighted different assets of our business rules management platform. For instance our efforts, we have been investing in easier integration with other products as well as better performance and manageability for large-scale implementations. But also the various ways the Visual Rules Suite empowers business experts to do rule-authoring by themselves.
Have you ever been confronted with data in abundance? Which approach did you use to find out if there is something of interest hidden in your data? Did you go for business rules or data mining methods? Anyway, you haven’t combined the two, isn’t it?
In my recent white paper, I describe how the two approaches can be combined to the best advantage in a direct marketing and a process control scenario.
There is an interesting graphic by James Taylor in his post on Decision Management Technology illustrating that the various techniques for analyzing data are seen as separated building blocks. Sometimes – though not by James Taylor – business rules and data mining approaches are even treated as competitors. I however think that the two have plain and simple different fields of application.
Have I piqued your curiosity? Then read my white paper Two Reputedly Opposed Approaches: On the Integration of Business Rules and Data Mining and tell me your experience with the exploration and analysis of large data sets.
