Reentrancy and Scoping for Multitenant Rule Engines

Kennedy Kambona, Thierry Renaux, Wolfgang De Meuter

2017

Abstract

Multitenant web systems can share one application instance across many clients distributed over multiple devices. These systems need to manage the shared knowledge base reused by the various users and applications they support. Rather than hard-coding all the shared knowledge and ontologies, developers often encode this knowledge in the form of rules to program server-side business logic. In such situations, a modern rule engine can be used to accommodate the knowledge for tenants of a multitenant system. Existing rule engines, however, were not conceptually designed to support or cope with the knowledge of the rules of multiple applications and clients at the same time. They are not fit for multitenant setups since one has to manually hard-code the modularity of the knowledge for the various applications and clients, which quickly becomes complex and fallible. We present Serena, a rule-based framework for supporting multitenant reactive web applications. The distinctive feature of Serena is the notion of reentrancy and scoping in its Rete-based rule engine, which is the key solution in making it multitenant. We validate our work through a simulated case study and a comparison with a similar common-place approach, showing that our flexible approach improves computational efficiency in the engine.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kambona K., Renaux T. and De Meuter W. (2017). Reentrancy and Scoping for Multitenant Rule Engines . In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-758-246-2, pages 59-70. DOI: 10.5220/0006283400590070

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist17,
author={Kennedy Kambona and Thierry Renaux and Wolfgang De Meuter},
title={Reentrancy and Scoping for Multitenant Rule Engines},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,},
year={2017},
pages={59-70},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006283400590070},
isbn={978-989-758-246-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: WEBIST,
TI - Reentrancy and Scoping for Multitenant Rule Engines
SN - 978-989-758-246-2
AU - Kambona K.
AU - Renaux T.
AU - De Meuter W.
PY - 2017
SP - 59
EP - 70
DO - 10.5220/0006283400590070