Washington, DC and Edison, NJ -- October 17, 2006 -- OpenRules, Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a government contract “Automating Business Rules Creation Using Machine Learning Models” issued by the National Headquarters Office of Research, Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

In a Statement of Work issued along with the Request for Proposal IRS noted that “One of the key long-term outcomes in NHQ Research’s strategic mission is to develop tools, methodologies and models to assist the operating divisions in modernizing tax administration functions.  Significant advancements in problem solving techniques such as machine learning and business rules applications have created a significant opportunity to enhance traditional research methods with advanced technology in order to improve the tax compliance and tax administration functions.  The availability of the National Research Program data provides an excellent opportunity for NHQ Research to test out the concept of using Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to discover new business rules which could assist and supplement knowledge and rules applied by subject matter experts.” 

OpenRules, a popular open source business rules management system, includes a special component entitled "Rule Learner" that integrates a machine learning approach with business rules.  OpenRules Rule Learner can apply different ML methods to a large volume of historical data and present the learned rules in a form automatically executable by the OpenRules engine.  The objective of this project is to integrate machine learning results into a standard business rules environment in a way that will allow IRS subject matter experts to easily identify any gaps between the rules developed by its experts to detect potential non-compliance and the rules automatically developed by the machine learning system.  The IRS expects that an integrated approach of automated knowledge discovery with business rules authoring, if successful, will result in a sophisticated feedback mechanism for operational enhancements.

About Internal Revenue Service
The information about IRS can be found at http://www.irs.gov

About OpenRules
OpenRules, Inc. is a NJ-based government contractor whose specialists are known to many leading US businesses as experts in developing practical decision support applications using different decision support technologies.  OpenRules, Inc. is the company that develops, supports, and markets the OpenRules™ product and provides related consulting and training services.  For more details, please visit http://www.openrules.com/.