Commercial RDR Systems
PKS RDR are used to provide clinical interpretations of chemical
pathology reports to guide GPs in their patient management, further
test ordering and so on. To date about 30 million patient reports
have been processed by Labwizard, PKS’s RDR system (Lindsay
Peters, personal communication). About 100 knowledge bases have
been built by 14 chemical pathology laboratories (Lindsay Peters,
personal communication). A more detailed report on use of RDR by
one pathology company has been published (Compton, Peters et al. 2006).
Pathologists in this company had developed over 16,000 rules. A
particularly important result from this study was the industrial
demonstration that the cost of adding a rule was very short, on average
about one minute of expert time, and was close to independent of
knowledge-base size even with knowledge bases of thousands of rules.
PKS
commissioned a report from IRIS
research to survey the GP’s using a particular laboratory services
shortly after the introduction of Labwizard the RDR tool. The GPs note
improved patient outcomes because of the improved reports. Compton, Peters et al. 2006 also shows that more knowledge
bases were added over time despite this resulting in increased costs to
the laboratory because of a per-usage charging model. Presumably this
only occurred because the pathology companies thought that the improved
reports were likely to increase the GP requests directed towards their
pathology service.
(Note: I
have a small shareholding in PKS)
Tesco.com, the world’s
largest on-line grocer with a turnover exceeding $2B. uses an RDR
system (Sonetto) developed by Ivis (Sarraf and Ellis 2006); see also a presentation
on Sonetto. Apparently, Tesco business analysts have developed 100s of
1000s of RDR rules used mainly for ensuring appropriate information
about products appears on affiliate sites (e.g. Kelkoo)
and in suggesting products to customers. Ivis Sonnetto product has won two Microsoft Awards, including one for innovation. See also .
The core system that Erudine offers, seems from one of its whitepapers,
to be identical to RDR; however it does not refer RDR. This may
have been an independent development, but there may be commercial
reasons for lack of reference to RDR, as Erudine was previously known
as Rippledown Solutions suggesting a closer connection. The Erudine website
suggests a range of interesting applications, particularly in
re-engineering legacy systems. The legacy system provides a
stream of cases that are used to create the new system.
The Yawl
Group provides consultancy and training services for companies
developing business process management, particularly through the use of
the YAWL workflow management system. YAWL uses RDR as a core component of its workflow management system.
Ucube is an professional services company that offers a Ripple-Down Rule engine product amongst other products.
Sricom a consulting company that provides a range of services in IT systems consulting. It provides an RDR-based tool for developing pro forma applications .
KMagent is University of Tasmania spin-off that use RDR for document
management and information retrieval from dynamic web pages. It
is based on the work of Byeong Kang and his group. Byeong has also been involved in introducing RDR to a number of Korean companies.
Other
There is a range of other industrial commercial underway with various
large commercial partners, including other medical applications,
business processes, and managing email
Machine Learning
There has been a range of machine learning research by various groups using one of the RDR representations. WEKA provides the RIDOR RDR learner. The is a classic batch processing supervised learner, but with an RDR representation