JRE: A Visual Semantic Rule Management Tool

In the last few years, rules are increasingly being used for knowledge representation in ontology-based business rule systems on the Semantic Web. As the size of rule bases increases and there exist a great number of rules engines with its own rules language, users face the problem in understanding and managing the complexity of the knowledge represented by the rules. To address this problem, we have implemented a visual semantic rule management tool called JRE (Java Rule Editor). The main goals of this tool are: first, to help non-specialists to understand and edit the meaning of complex rules with rule visualization and, second, to make this development independent of rule engine products. Rules do not include its own rule engine implementations but acts as a broker to the preferred rule engine. In this way, business rules can be reused across different rule engines and through different projects in the company. The JRE is part of a project devoted to the definition of a new platform core for semantic logistics system.