While DMN-like decision tables are powerful enough to represent business logic for many practical problems, in the real world our customers frequently define new types of decision tables that are specific to their business domains. For example, OpenRules was chosen for a large project that in particular dealt with spatial business rules. Their customers, suppliers, and operations vary by region, and the distances between them were important considerations for making decisions. They already used a Geospatial Information System (GIS) to explore spatial relationships that leveraged the industry-standard Java Topology Suite (JTS) with a powerful Java API.

However, they wanted their business (!) users to natively define and maintain complex spatial rules without becoming experts in specific Java API. This 2014 presentation describes how OpenRules helped this customer to create a Spatial Decision Table template allowing stakeholders with no GIS training to use plain English in familiar Decision Model spreadsheets to define spatially aware business rules without any additional software.