Abstract: |
In the field of research in information systems development, the business rules approach has achieved a lot of attention and already has a strong motivation behind its application. Business rules are used in information systems to represent domain knowledge and to maintain rule systems efficiently in volatile business environment. In information systems business rules are implemented as information-processing rules. In practice, information-processing rules are implemented by executable rules, like active DBMS SQL triggers. A number of methods and languages were proposed to develop rule models (UML with OCL, Ross method, CDM RuleFrame, Conceptual graphs approach, and etc.). But common methods and languages are insufficient or at least inconvenient for a complete and systematic modelling of all types of rules, since they emphasize only particular aspects and types of rules by neglecting other aspects. Therefore, none of the proposed languages or methods is accepted as technology standard yet. Majority of existing methods do not deal with reuse of knowledge acquired in the analysis of some application domain and automatic implementation of rules.
Ontologies are used to represent real-world domain knowledge. Ontology defines the basic concepts and their relationships comprising the vocabulary of an application domain and the axioms for constraining the relationships among concepts. Therefore, knowledge represented by ontology can be used for generating rules, which is an important and integral part of each conceptual data model. Moreover, ontology expressed in a formal way can be transformed into rule model automatically.
In our research we analyse the posibility of ontology axioms transformation into a (-semi)formal rule model which is a part of a conceptual model.
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