What's the problem?
* At least $350 Billion is lost each year on IT, worldwide*
abandoned projects, rectification of errors, consequential losses,
* not all of this could be saved by a better development process operational errors, changing business conditions
* But potential savings are at least$200 Billion per year
* This requires a radical re-think of the way we build systems

Extensible Rule Markup Language (XRML) can support the automatic processing of implicit rules embedded in the hypertexts and help human browse them for their comprehension.
To meet this end, XRML requires three components: Rule Identification Markup Language (RIML), Rule Structure Markup Language (RSML), and Rule Triggering Markup Language (RTML).

A good article to know about how business rules leads to more maintainable applications. It describes how business rules can help in making applications more maintainable by having Modularity, Consistency, Simplicity & Conciseness, Self-descriptiveness & Understandability, Independent Testability.

In recent years it has been discovered that business rules constitute an entire body of knowledge that has not been adequately addressed in either the analysis or design phases of system development. Typically, business rules have been buried in program code or in database structures. It turns out, however, that the identification of business rules is important in its own right. Moreover, it is different from the definition of data structure in a data model, and from the definition of processes.

The AAAI Spring Symposium "AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management" brings together the three areas of interest: "Semantic Technologies", "Business Rules" and "Business Process Management", currently addressed by different (research) communities, offering the possibility of result presentations, discussions and exchange of ideas in the inspiring setting of the Stanford campus.

The Spring Symposia Series are presented by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science.