Bug 778682 (SOA-1152)

Summary: JBoss Rules Reference Guide is very jargonistic and difficult to read
Product: [JBoss] JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4 Reporter: Dana Mison <dmison>
Component: DocumentationAssignee: Mark Proctor <mark.proctor>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: high    
Version: 4.3 GA   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: FUTURE   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
URL: http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/SOA-1152
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2011-02-22 19:54:48 UTC Type: Feature Request
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Description Dana Mison 2009-01-29 01:22:36 UTC 
Affects: Documentation (Ref Guide, User Guide, etc.)
project_key: SOA

Many sections of the JBoss Rules Reference Guide are very jargonistic and very confusing to read.  For someone who just needs to know what it is all about to do their job, it would be very frustrating.  This is especially true for Chapter 2 which is supposed to introducing the concepts of rule engines used in Drools.

I suggest that Chapter 2 be completely rewritten with a focus of explaining the concepts in plain english.

Also several key terms are never clearly defined:
  Fact
  Working Memory
  Production Memory
  Inference Engine
  Agenda
  Salience

Examples from Chapter 2:

"A Production Rule System is turing complete with a focus on knowledge representation to express
propositional and first order logic in a concise, non ambiguous and declarative manner. "

"Rules are written using First Order Logic, or predicate logic, which extends Propositional Logic. Emil
Leon Post was the first to develop an inference based system using symbols to express logic - as a
consequence of this he was able to prove that any logical system (including mathematics) could be
expressed with such a system."