NL-based automated software requirements elicitation and specification

This paper presents a novel approach to automate the process of software requirements elicitation and specification. The software requirements elicitation is perhaps the most important phase of software development as a small error at this stage can result in absurd software designs and implementations. The automation of the initial phase (such as requirement elicitation) phase can also contribute to a long standing challenge of automated software development. The presented approach is based on Semantic of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR), an OMG’s recent standard. We have also developed a prototype tool SR-Elicitor (an Eclipse plugin), which can be used by software engineers to record and automatically transform the natural language software requirements to SBVR software requirements specification. The major contribution of the presented research is to demonstrate the potential of SBVR based approach, implemented in a prototype tool, proposed to improve the process of requirements elicitation and specification

SBVR to OWL 2 Mappings - An Automatable and Structural-Rooted Aproach

La amplia aplicabilidad del mapeo de reglas de negocio en sentencias ontológicas ha sido recientemente reconocida. Algunas de las aplicaciones más importantes son: (1) la utilización de razonadores ontológicos para probar la consistencia de la información del dominio del negocio, (2) la generación de una ontología destinada a ser utilizada en la etapa de análisis del proceso de desarrollo de software, y (3) la posibilidad de encapsular la especificación declarativa del conocimiento del negocio en un sistema de información mediante la implementación de una ontología. El lenguaje denominado Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) brinda soporte a tal enfoque al proveer al experto del negocio una forma lingüistica de describir semánticamente los conceptos y especificar las reglas de negocio, en forma independiente al diseño del sistema de información. Aunque trabajos previos han presentado algunas propuestas, resta definir un enfoque exhaustivo y automatizable de tales mapeos. Este trabajo presenta un conjunto amplio y detallado de transformaciones que permiten la generación automatizable de una ontología implementada en OWL 2, partiendo de la especificación SBVR del dominio del negocio. Tales transformaciones están basadas en la especificación estructural de ambos estándars, y son descriptas mediante un caso de estudio. Se ha realizado un ejemplo real de validación, abordando la factibilidad de los mapeos mediante la evalución de la calidad de la ontología resultante.Wide applicability of mapping business rules expressions to ontology statements have already been recognized. Some of the most important applications are: (1) using of ontology reasoners to prove the consistency of business domain information, (2) generation of an ontology intended to be used in the analysis stage of a software development process, and (3) the possibility of encapsulate the declarative specication of business knowledge into information software systems by means of an implemented ontology. The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) supports that approach by providing business people with a linguistic way to semantically describe business concepts and specify business rules in an independent way of any information system design. Previous work have presented some proposals but an exhaustive and automatable approach for them still is lacking. This work presents a broad and detailed set of transformations that allows the automatable generation of an OWL 2 ontology from the SBVR specications of a business domain. Such transformations are rooted on the structural specication of both standards and are depicted through a case study. A real case validation example was performed, approaching the feasibility of the mappings by the quality assessment of the developed ontology.Fil: Reynares, Emiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Tecnologica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Centro de Investigacion y Desarrollo de Ingenieria en Sistemas de Informacion; ArgentinaFil: Caliusco, Maria Laura. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Tecnologica Nacional. Facultad Regional Santa Fe. Centro de Investigacion y Desarrollo de Ingenieria en Sistemas de Informacion; ArgentinaFil: Galli, Maria Rosa. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Santa Fe. Instituto de Desarrollo y Diseño (i); Argentin

An Architecture to infer Business Rules from Event Condition Action Rules implemented in the Persistence Layer

The business rules that govern the behaviour of a business process can be hardcoded in different ways in a software application. The modernization or improvement of these applications to a process-oriented perspective implies typically the modification of the business rules. Frequently, legacy systems are not well-documented, and almost always, the documentation they have is not updated. As a consequence many times is necessary the analysis of source code and databases structures to be transformed into a business language more understandable by the business experts involved in the modernization process. Database triggers are one of the artefacts in which business rules are hardcoded. We focus on this kind of artefacts, having in mind to avoid the manual analysis of the triggers by a database expert, and bringing it closer to business experts. To get this aim we need to discover business rules that are hardcoded in triggers, and translate it into vocabularies that are commonly used by business experts. In this paper we propose an ADM-based architecture to discover business rules and rewrite then into a language that can be understood by the business experts.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-13714Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2010-20057-C03-02Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2010-21744-C02-

A FORMALIZED TRANSFORMATION PROCESS FOR GENERATING DESIGN MODELS FROM BUSINESS RULES

Business rules play a critical role in building and maintaining effective and flexible information systems. In light of that critical role, the publication of the Semantic Business Vocabulary and Business Rules standard (SBVR), has been regarded a highly significant advance. Following that release, a number of research efforts have been made to convert SBVR to design models, most of which are structural models represented in UML. However, so far the proposed methodologies tend to be of an exploratory nature in the sense that they are not built on a rigorous foundation. Our aim is to identify a core subset of the SBVR features and show how those core SBVR features can be translated into an equivalent UML structural model. To do that on a sound foundation, we first provide formal models of the core SBVR and the target UML class diagram. We then transform the core SBVR model to the UML class model, completed with proofs of correctness, and describe how the mapping rules can be applied in a transformation process. Finally, to show the usefulness of our formal approach, we discuss how it is used as a crucial component in a larger project, which embraces a number of practical objectives

A commentary on standardization in the Semantic Web, Common Logic and MultiAgent Systems

Given the ubiquity of the Web, the Semantic Web (SW) offers MultiAgent Systems (MAS) a most wide-ranging platform by which they could intercommunicate. It can be argued however that MAS require levels of logic that the current Semantic Web has yet to provide. As ISO Common Logic (CL) ISO/IEC IS 24707:2007 provides a firstorder logic capability for MAS in an interoperable way, it seems natural to investigate how CL may itself integrate with the SW thus providing a more expressive means by which MAS can interoperate effectively across the SW. A commentary is accordingly presented on how this may be achieved. Whilst it notes that certain limitations remain to be addressed, the commentary proposes that standardising the SW with CL provides the vehicle by which MAS can achieve their potential.</p

BPMN: A Meta Model for the Happy Path

Recently, the OMG has been working on developing a new standard for a business process management notation (BPMN). This standard development results in documents that contain the newest approved version of a standard or a standard proposal that can be ammended. It is our vision that such a standard document, that also serves as a specification for BPMN modeling tool developers could benefit from a fact-oriented model in which the same domain knowledge is represented conceptually as a list of concept definitions (including naming conventions), a set of information structure diagrams and the constraints or business rules that govern the instances of the information structure diagrams. In this paper we will show precisely, how such a fact-oriented conceptual view on a standard document can be created, and we will show how a fact-oriented approach can improve the completeness of a specification.management information;

A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English

Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires the combination of a number of different elements, including information extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation, and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English. Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and demonstrate the workflow established by our tool