Business Rules for semantics-aware Business Modeling: overview and open issues

This work outlines the benefits of adopting semantics-aware formalisms in the description of business vocabularies and rules in the context of enterprise modelling. Within the framework outlined by the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach, these formalisms may enable a wide range of inference capabilities and provide a more direct translation of business models into formalisms that can drive the actual orchestration of business processes. Furthermore, whenever the semantics conveyed by business vocabularies and rules can be portrayed with semantic web languages such as Web Ontology Language (OWL)-Descriptive Logic (DL), business domains can be evaluated according to the open-world interpretation of a Knowledge Base (KB) that constitutes the default interpretation of business models. Three different use cases addressing, respectively, intramodel, model-to-model and model-to-metadata processing of business vocabularies and rules are presented.