In recent years, rule based technologies have enjoyed remarkable adoption in two areas: (1) Business Rules Processing and (2) Web-Centered Reasoning. The first trend is caused by the software development life cycle. The second trend is related to the Semantic Web and Service-oriented technologies which aim to supplement the Web with a huge repository of cross-referenced, machine-understandable data and processes. For both trends, rules can be used to extract, derive, transform, and integrate information in a platform-independent manner. While early rule engines and environments were complex, expensive to maintain, and not very user friendly, the current generation of rule technology provides enhanced usability, scalability and performance, and is less costly. A general advantage of using rules is that they are usually represented in a platform independent manner, often using XML.
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