A call for papers has been issued in connection with the International Workshop on Rule Markup Languages for Business Rules on the Semantic Web, to he held June 14, 2002, Sardinia, Italy. This workshop follows the First International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002), to be held June 9-12, 2002 in the same location. The organizing committee welcomes submissions on all topics related to rule markup languages; in particular, they encourage papers on reaction rules in the Semantic Web (event/action languages, execution models) and on defeasible rules in the Semantic Web (defeasible concept definitions in ontologies, resolving conflicts in triggered action sets). Rule markup languages "support the expression of business rules as modular, stand-alone units in a declarative way and the publication/exchange of these rules between different systems and tools. They are expected to play an important role in facilitating business-to-customer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) interactions over the Web."

Rule markup languages: "Derivation rules can be included in an ontology to define derived concepts on top of base concepts. In this way, for instance, derived business terms, such as customer categories, may be defined. Whenever a rule refers to an incomplete predicate, for which explicit negative information has to be represented along with ordinary (positive) information, a second negation, supplementing negation-as-failure, is needed (as in the formalism of extended logic programs). Using this negation in the head of a rule, one can express conflicting rules that may defeat each other. Such a language for defeasible rules is useful to represent business rules allowing for exceptions. In addition to derivation rules, there is another type of rule which allows to specify the reactive and communicative behavior of a system or agent: reaction rules -- in other contexts also called event-condition-action (ECA) rules or triggers. Business rules that specify the various steps of a business process can be encoded in the form of reaction rules. A general markup language for business rules has to accommodate these different types of rules and support their interoperation..." [from the Workshop website]

Workshop Co-Chairs: Michael Schroeder (City University London, UK) and Gerd Wagner (Eindhoven University of Technology, NL).

Workshop Organizing Committee: Harold Boley (DFKI Kaiserslautern, DE); Benjamin Grosof (MIT Sloan School of Management, USA); Steve Ross-Talbot (EnigmaTec Ltd., UK); Michael Schroeder (City Univ. London, UK); Said Tabet (Nisus Inc., USA); Gerd Wagner (Eindhoven Univ. of Technology, NL).