Design-time Resource Overview

In a rule engine, the things that the project works with such as employees, inventory, parts, and so on are concepts in the ontology of the project, as are scorecards, which hold metrics.

When TIBCO BusinessEvents Data Modeling software is used, a database concept feature enables you to create concepts from database data, and a state modeler feature enables you to model the behavior of concepts given certain occurrences.

Events such as flight take-off, purchase of a mortgage, sale of stock, and so on are also part of the ontology. Events can be created from messages arriving through channels. Events can also be generated internally, for use in the engine and to send out messages to external systems.

Rules are triggered by events and by changes in concepts and scorecards. For example, rules might cause baggage to be rerouted if there is a certain problem at the airport. Rule functions are functions written in the rule language that can be called from rules or other rule functions. Some rule functions serve special purposes at startup, shutdown, and in preprocessing events. When TIBCO BusinessEvents Data Modeling software is used, its decision tables also provide rules. These, however, are business rules, and are triggered only indirectly by the inferencing engine.

When TIBCO BusinessEvents Event Stream Processing software is used, you can design complex queries that provide information on the event stream or on cached objects that can in turn be fed into rules. You can also design event patterns to watch for, and take certain actions when they occur or do not occur.

Designing the ontology and the rules well is key to a good CEP (complex event processing) project.