Verbalising R2ML rules into SBVR
Oana Nicolae and Gerd Wagner
Department of Internet Technology
Institute of Informatics
Brandenburg Technical University at Cottbus, Germany
fnicolae, G.Wagnerg@tu-cottbus.de
Abstract—Nowadays, business rules receive a lot of attention
from both industry and academia, as they are considered the ideal
vehicle for capturing business logic. The purpose of our paper
is to raise the level of business logic abstraction with the help
of existing, mature enough, R2ML language, in order to obtain
higher semantic representations of rules and their basic con-
structs i.e. SBVR. Our paper focuses on the informal translation
from R2ML derivation and integrity rules, into SBVR Structured
English in order to provide means for business rules validation
and authorisation. SBVR Semantic Formulations of R2ML rules
and their basic atoms are also described and exemplified, as they
are the unique construct of SBVR Standard, that captures and
structures the meaning of rules to enable further translations
into executable rule languages/engines, following MDA abstract
levels of rule modelling.
I. INTRODUCTION
The concept of business rules became so common in the ac-
tual literature, as its usage tends to permeate different commu-
nities: software architects community i.e. UML[7] modellers,
ontology architects, business processes modellers.
Due to the large amount of rule languages/engines that exist
on the business market, the problem of rules inter-operability
had emerged. From the perspective of Model Driven Archi-
tecture1 (MDA), rules can be considered at three different
abstraction levels i.e. CIM2, PIM3, PSM4, for refining the
conceptualisation process of any business application.
Business rules are for business people and must be spec-
ified in a declarative way, as close as possible to natural
language i.e. EU-Rent reviews each corporate account at
EU-Rent Headquarters5. Attempto Controlled English (ACE)
([8], [2]), Structured English, RuleSpeak English or Semantics
of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) [6] are
natural language styles, easily understood by business people
and suitable for defining business models. These languages are
situated at MDA’s CIM level of abstraction and are appropriate
for capturing business rules together with their vocabularies.
The main purpose of a markup approach is to provide means
for reusing, publication and interchanging of rules between dif-
ferent systems and tools. Actually, they also play an important
role in facilitating business-to-customer (B2C) and business-
to-business (B2B) interactions over the Internet. Moreover,
1MDA - http://www.omg.org/mda/
2CIM - Computational Independent Model
3PIM - Platform Independent Model
4PSM - Platform Specific Model
5EU-Rent - http://www.eurobizrules.org/eurentcs/eurent.htm
an interchange approach always supposes less transformations
than PSM-to-PSM translations.
The main standardisation communities, OMG6 and W3C7
focus their work on providing business rules specification lan-
guages for all MDA layers of models in order to obtain rules
inter-operability. W3C mainly deals with semantic web com-
munity and academia. They developed and sustain standards
(i.e. recommendations) such as: RuleML8, SWRL9 (combine
OWL10 and RuleML) and RIF [1] (Rule Interchange Format
- standardisation is still in progress) which are pertinent to
MDA’s PIM level of abstraction.
On the other side, OMG community, dominated by software
suppliers and consultants that belong to business rules com-
munity delivers SBVR and OCL11, PRR12 Specifications i.e.
CIM and PIM levels, respectively.
These standards are not sustained by most of business rules
management system tools, as they implement proprietary rule
languages. The reasons for this situation imply the existence
of only a few interchange works in the academia i.e. RIF
language still has no well defined guidelines of how to
implement the transformations and it also do not specify how
to test the correction of the translation.
In this context, EU network of Excelence REWERSE13
developed an XML-based, general rule markup language i.e.
R2ML [9]. R2ML brought together all the best characteristics
from OCL, SWRL and RuleML languages and refines them
with rule categorisation: integrity, derivation, production and
ECA rules (i.e. Event-Condition-Action rules or Reaction
Rules). R2ML complies Web naming concepts like (URI and
namespaces), datatype concepts of RDF14 and the ontological
distinction between objects and data. R2ML is a mature
enough, rule interchange language, already tested in practise
by means of translators15. We choose R2ML, as it does not
restrict its use only for markup purposes: it can be used for
modelling the Semantic Web services and it can give complete
6OMG - http://www.omg.org
7W3C - http://www.w3.org
8RuleML - http://www.ruleml.org
9SWRL - http://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/
10OWL - http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/
11OCL - http://www.omg.org/docs/ptc/03-10-14.pdf
12PRR - http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?dtc/07-11-04.pdf
13REWERSE - http://rewerse.net/
14RDF - http://www.w3.org/RDF/
15R2ML Translators -
http://oxygen.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/rewerse-i1/?q=node/15
10th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing
978-0-7695-3523-4/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/SYNASC.2008.30
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