Ontology-Driven Business Rule Specification

2013 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederik Gailly ◽  
Guido L. Geerts

ABSTRACT Discovering business rules is a complex task for which many approaches have been proposed including analysis, extraction from code, and data mining. In this paper, a novel approach is presented in which business rules for an enterprise model are generated based on the semantics of a domain ontology. Starting from an enterprise model for which the business rules need to be defined, the approach consists of four steps: (1) classification of the enterprise model in terms of the domain ontology (semantic annotation), (2) matching of the enterprise model constructs with ontology-based Enterprise Model Configurations (EMCs), (3) determination of Business Rule Patterns (BRPs) associated with the EMCs, and (4) use of the semantic annotations to instantiate the business rule patterns; that is, to specify the actual business rules. The success of this approach depends on two factors: (1) the existence of a semantically rich domain ontology, and (2) the strength of the knowledge base consisting of EMC-BRP associations. The focus of this paper is on defining and illustrating the new business rule discovery approach: Ontology-Driven Business Rule Specification (ODBRS). The domain of interest is enterprise systems, and an extended version of the Resource-Event-Agent Enterprise Ontology (REA-EO) is used as the domain ontology. A small set of EMC-BRP associations—i.e., an example knowledge base—is developed for illustration purposes. The new approach is demonstrated with an example.

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 586-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vitus Lam

Purpose – An integral part of declarative process modelling is to guarantee that the execution of a declarative workflow is compliant with the respective business rules. The purpose of this paper is to establish a formal framework for representing business rules and determining whether any business rules are violated during the executions of declarative process models. Design/methodology/approach – In the approach, a business rule is phrased in terms of restricted English that is related to a constraint template. Linear temporal logic (LTL) is employed as a formalism for defining the set of constraint templates. By exploiting the theorem-proving feature of the Logics Workbench (LWB), business rule violations are then detected in an automatic manner. Findings – This study explored the viability of encoding: first, process executions by means of LTL and second, business rules in terms of restricted English that built upon pattern-oriented templates and LTL. The LWB was used for carrying out temporal reasoning through automated techniques. The applicability of the formal verification approach was exemplified by a case study concerning supply chain management. The findings showed that practical reasoning could be achieved by combining declarative process modelling, restricted English, pattern-oriented templates, LTL and LWB. Originality/value – First, new business rule templates are proposed; second, business rules are expressed in restricted English instead of graphical constructs; third, both finite execution trace and business rules are grounded in LTL. There is no need to deal with the semantic differences between different formalisms; and finally, the theorem prover LWB is used for the conformance checking of a finite execution trace against business rules.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-23
Author(s):  
Violeta Domanović ◽  
Jasmina Bogićević ◽  
Bojan Krstić

Contemporary business environment imposes new business rules. The maximization of profit and shareholder value cannot be the only aim of an enterprise. Instead, enterprises are forced to maximize value of all stakeholders in order to survive in the long run. The issue of sustainability has become of crucial significance, and especially measurement and reporting on sustainability, as well as, its effects on financial performances, as still dominant ones in the contemporary business performance measurement models. Hence, the subject of the research is the enterprise sustainability in the contemporary business environment. The aim of the research is to stress the role and the significance of the sustainability in the process of improving the enterprise efficiency. The research results show that the enterprise sustainability has the positive implications on the business performances in the long run, as well as on the welfare of all stakeholders. In order to be more transparent, it is desirable for enterprises to create the sustainability report, in the integration with the traditional business report, which would give the complete overview of enterprise efficiency.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 281-295
Author(s):  
Irene Tangkawarow ◽  
◽  
Riyanarto Sarno ◽  
Daniel Siahaan ◽  
◽  
...  

The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) standard was developed by the Object Management Group (OMG) for business purposes. SBVR is used for transformation of business vocabulary and business rules into business processes. Gateways are used for regulating the divergence and convergence of flow objects in the business process. The existing business rules in SVBR do not support all gateways in BPMN, whereas there are conditions where branching situations in business rules occur. This article introduces parallelism rules (OR rules) and complex rules to increase 50.6% usage of the existing AND rules and XOR rules in SBVR. The main contribution of this research is to introduce new formal model of inclusive gateway (OR) and complex gateway that allow parallelism and branching to be modeled using SBVR. Thus, this study increases coverage of the usage gateway in SBVR achieved 66.7%. The authors provide branching cases with various levels of complexity, i.e. nested conditions and non-free choice conditions, using the formal description of SBVR.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
A A I N Eka Karyawati

Paragraph extraction is a main part of an automatic question answering system, especially in answering why-question. It is because the answer of a why-question usually contained in one paragraph instead of one or two sentences. There have been some researches on paragraph extraction approaches, but there are still few studies focusing on involving the domain ontology as a knowledge base. Most of the paragraph extraction studies used keyword-based method with small portion of semantic approaches. Thus, the question answering system faces a typical problem often occuring in keyword-based method that is word mismatches problem. The main contribution of this research is a paragraph scoring method that incorporates the TFIDF-based and causality-detection-based similarity. This research is a part of the ontology-based why-question answering method, where ontology is used as a knowledge base for each steps of the method including indexing, question analyzing, document retrieval, and paragraph extraction/selection. For measuring the method performance, the evaluations were conducted by comparing the proposed method over two baselines methods that did not use causality-detection-based similarity. The proposed method shown improvements over the baseline methods regarding MRR (95%, 0.82-0.42), P@1 (105%, 0.78-0.38), P@5(91%, 0.88-0.46), Precision (95%, 0.80-0.41), and Recall (66%, 0.88-0.53).


Almost from the outset, most large companies saw the ‘new biotechnology’ not as a new business but as a set of very powerful techniques that, in time, would radically improve the understanding of biological systems. This new knowledge was generally seen by them as enhancing the process of invention and not as a substitute for tried and tested ways of meeting clearly identified targets. As the knowledge base grows, so the big-company response to biotechnology becomes more positive. Within ICI, biotechnology is now integrated into five biobusinesses (Pharmaceuticals, Agrochemicals, Seeds, Diagnostics and Biological Products). Within the Central Toxicology Laboratory it also contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms of toxic action of chemicals as part of assessing risk. ICI has entered two of these businesses (Seeds and Diagnostics) because it sees biotechnology making a major contribution to the profitability of each.


2009 ◽  
Vol 55 (No. 1) ◽  
pp. 20-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Rábová

Up to date business is managed by large-scale different rules that regulate how the business acts and how it is structured. We find the rules in law, regulation, business policy document, procedures manual, system documentation, memoranda etc. These reference resources may provide the specific basis for a rule or offer a background, context or explanation of the business rule. In the recent years, it has been discovered that business rules constitute an entire body of knowledge that has not been adequately addressed in either the analysis or design phases of the information system development. Typically, business rules have been buried in the program code or in the database structures. The article deals with the business rules approach and rule technology and helps to identify the business and technical opportunities they afford to the company. It offers the business process model and its integration with business rules. This approach could provide business analysts with an essential approach to understanding, redesigning and communicating what really happens in the business processes (in agricultural area). It serves to understand the business impact of any change in small and medium-sized organizations. We use the UML notation and its business model extension.


Author(s):  
Vitus S. W. Lam

Drawing on business rules for constructing business process models by a constraint-driven methodology is a distinct characteristic of declarative process modeling. Given the intricacies of business rules, there is a pragmatic need to conduct conflict-free assessments for business rules in an automatic manner. In this paper, business rules are stated in terms of restricted English by harnessing a group of predefined business rule templates. With linear temporal logic that serves as a semantic foundation for the business rule templates, a pair of business rules represented as a linear temporal logic specification is translated into an associated Büchi automaton via LTL2BA, LTL3BA and ltl2tgba. A Büchi automaton that accepts the empty language signifies that the two business rules are in conflict with each other. The suitability of the formal framework and the three automated tools is evaluated by an industry-level case study.


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