Research Projects

Modeling Business Rules

A business enterprise typically functions using business rules. A business rule is a statement that intends to assert the structure or control the behavior of the enterprise. From an information systems perspective, business rules function as constraints on a database helping to ensure that the structure and content of the real world-sometimes referred to as miniworld-is accurately incorporated into the database. It is important to elicit these rules during the analysis and design stage, since the captured rules are the basis for subsequent development of a business constraints repository. We present a taxonomy for set-based business rules, and describe a framework for modeling rules that constrain the cardinality of sets. Our proposed framework includes various types of constraints on a semantic model that supports abstractions like classification, generalization/specialization, aggregation and association. Via our proposed framework, we show how explicitly capturing business rules will help bridge the semantic gap between the real world and its representation in an information system.

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