Critical evaluation of the XTT2 rule representation through comparison with CLIPS

There are two main approaches to the design Business Rules. The first one involves formalized methods that strictly define the syntax and semantics of rules. This approach usually requires technical skills or conceptual knowledge and therefore is not appropriate for everyone. In the second approach, dedicated rule languages are used for facilitating rules specification. Nevertheless, such languages are usually programming solutions without a precisely defined semantics. This may cause ambiguities in knowledge interpretation and thus, the efficient rule interoperability becomes impossible. The goal of our work is to develop a formalized model for a rule representation which will allow for an effective rule interchanging. For this purpose, we want to combine the above mentioned approaches by tailoring the formalized rule representation called XTT2 to languages provided by CLIPS or Drools. This paper is the first step in our research providing an identification of the most important differences between the XTT2 and CLIPS rule languages.