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

Transforming enterprise ontologies into SBVR formalizations

In 2007 the Object Management Group (OMG) adopted the Se- mantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) specification. The languages specified by this specification must be used to create business vocab- ularies and business rules of all kinds of business activities of all kinds of or- ganizations. This paper describes and demonstrates how enterprise ontologies can be transformed into SBVR formalizations

A model transformation framework to increase OCL usability

The usability of a modeling language has a direct relationship with several factors of models constructed with the modeling language, such as time required and accuracy. Object Constraint Language (OCL) is the most prevalent language to document system constraints that are annotated in the Unified Modeling Language (UML). OCL is reputed as a modeling language with difficult syntax, and prior knowledge of OCL is needed to use the language. These obstacles result in the low usability of OCL. Therefore, the current research proposes a model to automatically transform system constraints formed in English sentences to OCL specifications. The proposed model is based on the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach. The Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) properties of the proposed model are verified by the Maude model checker. To validate the proposed model and compare it with the existing work, the En2OCL (English2OCL) application is developed. This application is tested by three evaluation metrics: precision, recall, and f-measure. The En2OCL application is further compared with the NL2OCLviaSBVR application, which is the existing work on OCL generation from English sentences. The comparison shows a considerable improvement in precision, recall, and f-measure.Web of Science281261

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-

Towards a pivotal-based approach for business process alignment.

This article focuses on business process engineering, especially on alignment between business analysis and implementation. Through a business process management approach, different transformations interfere with process models in order to make them executable. To keep the consistency of process model from business model to IT model, we propose a pivotal metamodel-centric methodology. It aims at keeping or giving all requisite structural and semantic data needed to perform such transformations without loss of information. Through this we can ensure the alignment between business and IT. This article describes the concept of pivotal metamodel and proposes a methodology using such an approach. In addition, we present an example and the resulting benefits

An object-oriented approach to the translation between MOF Metaschemas

Since the 1960s, many formal languages have been developed in order to allow software engineers to specify conceptual models and to design software artifacts. A few of these languages, such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), have become widely used standards. They employ notations and concepts that are not readily understood by "domain experts," who understand the actual problem domain and are responsible for finding solutions to problems.The Object Management Group (OMG) developed the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) specification as a first step towards providing a language to support the specification of "business vocabularies and rules." The function of SBVR is to capture business concepts and business rules in languages that are close enough to ordinary language, so that business experts can read and write them, and formal enough to capture the intended semantics and present them in a form that is suitable for engineering the automation of the rules.The ultimate goal of business rules approaches is to build software systems directly from vocabularies and rules. One way of reaching this goal, within the context of model-driven architecture (MDA), is to transform SBVR models into UML models. OMG also notes the need for a reverse engineering transformation between UML schemas and SBVR vocabularies and rules in order to validate UML schemas. This thesis proposes an automatic approach to translation between UML schemas and SBVR vocabularies and rules, and vice versa. It consists of the application of a new generic schema translation approach to the particular case of UML and SBVR.The main contribution of the generic approach is the extensive use of object-oriented concepts in the definition of translation mappings, particularly the use of operations (and their refinements) and invariants, both formalized in the Object Constraint Language (OCL). Translation mappings can be used to check that two schemas are translations of each other, and to translate one into the other, in either direction. Translation mappings are declaratively defined by means of preconditions, postconditions and invariants, and they can be implemented in any suitable language. The approach leverages the object-oriented constructs embedded in Meta Object Facility (MOF) metaschemas to achieve the goals of object-oriented software development in the schema translation problem.The generic schema translation approach and its application to UML schemas and SBVR vocabularies and rules is fully implemented in the UML-based Specification Environment (USE) tool and validated by a case study based on the conceptual schema of the Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP) system

Enhancement of natural language processing approach for automated generation of object constraint language

Object Constraint Language (OCL) is the most prevalent modeling language to document requirement constraints that are annotated in the Unified Modeling Language. Various researchers have proved that OCL syntax is complex and difficult for some reasons such as its declarative nature. As the measure of ease-of-use factor of a language has a direct relationship with the language’s usability, the difficulties in the use of OCL result in the low usability of OCL. There are few research works for OCL generation using some different techniques such as pattern-based and Model-Driven Architecture (MDA)-based. The accuracy of the existing patternbased work generating OCL specification is low. MDA focuses on software development based on generating models and transforming these models between each other. There are some researches based on MDA to increase the usability of modeling languages. However, only one of the existing works supports OCL. The existing MDA-based work generating OCL specification does not support some OCL elements, such as collect and reject, and some UML elements such as enumeration. Therefore, this research proposes an MDA-based approach to transform requirement constraints formed in English sentences into OCL specifications using transformation rules. A software tool is developed to validate the proposed approach and compare with the existing works. The comparison shows that the proposed approach solves some limitations of the existing works such as support of some OCL and UML elements, which are not supported by the existing works. The comparison also shows that some accuracy improvement is achieved by the proposed approach in comparison with the existing works