Lexicalized Ontology for a Business Rules Management Platform: An Automotive Use Case

Abstract

This paper describes a platform that helps industrial domain experts to preserve the connection between textual sources and formalized business rules by using lexicalized ontologies both for links and for storage of the conceptual knowledge. Business Rules Management Systems (BRMSs) are used to update and query business rules of an automotive use case. They rely strongly on domain ontologies, which model the business knowledge and provide a conceptual vocabulary for the formalization of the rules that are expressed in written policies. We show that lexicalized ontologies are a key component of such BRMSs and how such knowledge can be encoded. Our proposed solution supports domain experts in the automotive industry in understanding and maintaining their business rules by presenting the relevant source documents that were used to create the ontological concepts. The use case is based on a car development scenario that models the connection between car testing scenarios, e.g., safety tests, and the methods and tools used to analyze and prepare these tests. The intended solution has been developed in the ONTORULE project and is still work in progress.

From Regulatory Texts to BRMS: How to Guide the Acquisition of Business Rules?

“…The main difference is that we exploit a lexicalized ontology [15] to represent the domain and its conceptual vocabulary. This vocabulary has a narrower scope than that of SBVR, which often includes specific and general-purpose dictionaries 8 whereas general purpose vocabulary remain mostly out of the scope of our transformations.…”

“…This transformation process takes as input a candidate rule and a lexicalized ontology, which specifies not only the relevant concepts and properties for the field of application but also the preferred and alternative terms to refer to them [15]. The goal is that the candidate rule conform to that vocabulary.…”