The wide applicability of mapping business rules expressions to ontology statements have been recently recognized. Some of the most important applications are: (1) using of on- tology 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 specification 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 provid- ing business people with a linguistic way to semantically describe business concepts and specify business rules in an independent way of any information system design. Although previous work have presented some proposals, an exhaustive and automatable approach for them is still lacking. This work presents a broad and detailed set of transformations that allows the automatable generation of an ontology implemented in OWL 2 from the SBVR specifications of a business domain. Such transformations are rooted on the struc- tural specification 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.
The interest in the use of ontologies for creating more intelligent and effective enterprise information systems has increased considerably in recent years. The most critical aspects during the development of these systems are: (1) to identify the ontology concepts and (2) to make explicit the business rules by means of the ontology axioms. In order to address these issues, mappings of business rules expressions to ontology statements based on different languages were proposed. Despite the efforts made in this area, some work remain to be done. This work presents a set of ontology design patterns providing a way to obtain an OWL/SWRL ontology by applying metamodel transformation rules over the SBVR specification of a business domain. Patterns are rooted in the structural specification of the standards, providing a set of mappings readily usable for business people or developers concerned with the implementation of a mapping tool. Moreover, translations from SBVR to SWRL language are presented in order to fill the gap in the expressive power of SBVR and OWL. The theoretical expressions of patterns are illustrated by means of an example depicting the core structure of a fictitious company.
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