A Conceptual Markup Language That Supports Interoperability between Business Rule Modeling Systems

Abstract

The Internet creates a strong demand for standardized exchange not only of data itself but especially of data semantics, as this same internet increasingly becomes the carrier of e-business activity (e.g. using web services). One way to achieve this is in the form of communicating “rich” conceptual schemas. In this paper we adopt the well-known CM technique of ORM, which has a rich complement of business rule specification, and develop ORM-ML, an XML-based markup language for ORM. Clearly domain modeling of this kind will be closely related to work on so-called ontologies and we will briefly discuss the analogies and differences, introducing methodological patterns for designing distributed business models. Since ORM schemas are typically saved as graphical files, we designed a textual representation as a marked-up document in ORM-ML so we can save these ORM schemas in a more machine exchangeable way that suits networked environments. Moreover, we can now write style sheets to convert such schemas into another syntax, e.g. pseudo natural language, a given rule engine’s language, first order logic.

An early version of this paper has been presented at the “Rule Markup Languages for Business Rules on the Semantic Web” Workshop, 2002.

Author’s names are in alphabetical order.