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Haley Introduces the Business Ontology eXchange; ''BOX'' Accelerates Business Rules Creation; Existing Ontologies Based on Insurance, Business Processes To Provide Pre-Built Vocabularies for HaleyAuthority Users
[March 14, 2006]

Haley Introduces the Business Ontology eXchange; ''BOX'' Accelerates Business Rules Creation; Existing Ontologies Based on Insurance, Business Processes To Provide Pre-Built Vocabularies for HaleyAuthority Users


PITTSBURGH --(Business Wire)-- March 14, 2006 -- Haley Systems, Inc., a leading provider of business rules management systems, today introduced the Business Ontology eXchange, or BOX(TM), the industry's first online resource where business analysts, knowledge workers, consultants, services partners and others can share existing ontologies. By starting with an existing ontology as a foundation, end users, systems integrators and independent software vendors can greatly accelerate their time-to-market and reduce the cost of implementing a business rules solution.



The BOX will contain industry-specific ontologies, such as insurance, as well as ontologies specific to horizontal applications and business processes, such as regulatory compliance or Web site personalization. The first ontology to be made available in the BOX will be one for Property & Casualty insurers, based on the ACORD XML standard. This will be followed closely by an ontology for the MISMO standard for mortgage insurance. All of the ontologies available in the BOX will be able to be imported for use in HaleyAuthority Express or Enterprise, so that users can immediately begin to customize a BOX ontology with their domain-specific knowledge and begin writing business rules.

By providing the BOX, Haley will ensure that its customers using HaleyAuthority to develop business applications using business rules will be able to:


-- Get started faster using pre-defined ontologies as a foundation

-- Understand the relationships of concepts out of the box

-- Shorten their application development cycles

-- Lower their implementation costs

-- Leverage their users' knowledge across applications and lines of business

An ontology consists of a collection of concepts and the relationships between them. In a business application using business rules, this correlates directly to the vocabulary of definitions required to create and operate the system. For example, in a property and casualty insurance underwriting application, the ontology must contain meaning and relationships for terms such as "claim," "applicant," "loss," "hazard," and "rating." For business users, ontologies enable better access to information and promote shared understanding across a business enterprise. Business rules applications developed using pre-built ontologies enable systems to achieve better "understanding" of information and meaning and therefore to perform more extensive, more complex processing.

"With the emergence of the Semantic Web, ontologies are playing an increasingly important strategic role in representation and processing of information," said Haley President and CEO Hans Witt. "In fact, ontologies will be the foundation of the Semantic Web. By having concepts defined and linked in an ontology, they can be more readily automated, integrated and reused across various applications. Once business terms are mapped into an ontology, dependencies can be quickly identified, which will require less redevelopment of processes and rules downstream. Moreover, the rules and processes will be able to be developed more quickly and by less senior technical staff, since they will use known business terms rather than a set of software functions."

"Having experienced the implementation of Haley's business rules platform to enhance workflow management within our underwriting organization, I see great value in the sharing of industry-specific ontologies," said Brett Clausen, Vice President of Underwriting and Operations for Farm Bureau Financial Services. "By starting with a pre-existing domain knowledge, an insurer can greatly reduce the time to implement natural language business rules, reduce project costs, and begin reaping the benefits of a rules-based approach much faster."

"By sharing ontologies systems integrators can more readily leverage the knowledge harvested in one project across multiple future initiatives and reduce the time to complete business rules engagements," said Sundar Vallinayagam, CEO of Haley partner Jarus Technologies, Inc. "Standardization is a key initiative across many industries. Ontologies like Haley's P&C Express Pak, which is based on the ACORD XML standard, will foster standardization both within an organization and across the insurance value chain."

Among business rules management system (BRMS) solution on the market today, HaleyAuthority is the only business rules capture and management tool that manages domain knowledge using a methodology based on ontologies. In fact, Haley's vision of business rules capture and management has always been ontology based. Haley's focus on business user empowerment and the ability to make English sentences understood in the context of the underlying ontology is consistent with the Semantic Web objective of describing explicit relationships among things and in order to provide semantic information intended for automated processing by computers. In addition, Haley's concept modeling technology helps to ensure consistency of understanding of key domain knowledge across many applications and business processes.

HaleyAuthority is a multi-user rule authoring and management application manages the ontology and the derived rules in a central SQL database. HaleyAuthority offers customers greater flexibility by providing a range of functionality across the various stages of the application development lifecycle, from decision logic capture and modeling to business rules implementation. Only Haley's authoring products allow capturing, testing and simulation of the business logic without first creating an underlying implementation. HaleyAuthority provides easy and intuitive, wizard-based implementation with Java classes, .NET assemblies, XML schema and SQL databases. These wizards allow IT personnel to integrate the business rules with software functions after the business logic has been validated.

HaleyAuthority comprises three tiers - HaleyAuthority Edge, HaleyAuthority Express, and HaleyAuthority Enterprise - each designed to address a different phase of development:

-- HaleyAuthority Edge helps business users to capture and organize their business unit's decision logic and business policy statements using English statements and common, everyday language rather than code. Users can create nested rules through applicability conditions, which greatly reduces the complexity of rules and enhances their readability.

-- HaleyAuthority Express allows business users to set up an ontology and validate that the captured statements can be understood by the system. With business modeling and a rich set of features with built-in understanding of units of time and other basics, users can define the concepts set forth in their rules, making them logically understood by the system.

-- HaleyAuthority Enterprise allows business and IT users to test, implement, and deploy the set of statements as business rules executed by HaleyRules, Haley Systems' business rules inference engine. HaleyAuthority Enterprise provides the highest level of functionality with the addition of full simulating and testing capabilities and rules workflow management. Haley users can deploy their BRMS on a wide variety of platforms, from PDAs and handheld devices to Microsoft Windows and many variants of UNIX and Linux.

With their modeling capabilities, HaleyAuthority Express and Enterprise are the only business rules authoring tools currently available that let business enterprises create ontologies from domain vocabularies and have complex rules operate upon it.

About Haley Systems

Founded in 1989, Haley Systems, Inc. is the first business rules management system (BRMS) vendor to address the demanding needs of dynamic enterprises that require frequent and rapid changes to complex business processes and rules. The Haley Business Rules Management Suite is the only BRMS on the market to combine high-performance, rules-based processing with natural English language understanding. Haley customers use plain English to automate business rules in their strategic software applications. By empowering business users to manage business rules and decisions directly from their desktop, Haley eliminates the IT bottleneck caused by dependency on programmer intervention to create and maintain rules. Haley users gain dramatically reduced rule change cycle times, resulting in several competitive advantages, including improved customer responsiveness, enhanced revenue opportunities, faster time-to-market and reduced IT costs. Major Global 1000 companies such as Adobe, Cigna, BUPA, KPN and One Beacon Insurance, as well as government organizations including the U.S. Army, and the Department of Labor rely on Haley products. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Haley is privately held, with venture capital backing from Pequot Ventures, Draper Triangle Ventures, LP, and PA Early Stage. For more information on Haley Systems, visit www.haley.com.

HaleyAuthority and HaleyRules are trademarks of Haley Systems, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

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