In recent years rule based technologies have enjoyed remarkable adoption in two areas: (1) Business Rules Processing and (2) Web-Centred Reasoning. The first trend is caused by the software development life cycle which needs to be accelerated at reduced cost. The second trend is related to the Semantic Web and Service-oriented technologies which aim to turn the Web into a huge repository of cross-referenced, machine-understandable data and processes. For both trends, rules can be used to extract, derive, transform, and integrate information in a platform-independent manner. While early rule engines and environments were complex, expensive to maintain, and not very user friendly, the current generation of rule technology provides enhanced usability, scalability and performance, and is less costly. A general advantage of using rules is that they are usually represented in a platform independent manner, often using XML. This fits well into today's distributed, heterogeneous Web-based system environments. Rules represented in standardized Web formats can be discovered, interchanged and invoked at runtime within and across Web systems, and can be interpreted and executed on any platform.

The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML-2008) is devoted to practical distributed rule technologies and rule-based applications which need language standards for rules operating in the context of, e.g., the Semantic Web, Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, Event-Driven Architectures and Service-Oriented Computing Applications.