Ontology Based Business Rules and Services Integration Environment

Abstract

Nowadays, the relationships among people, governments and organizations are subject to fast changes. The increasing demand for new services conducts to the need to create services from scratch and by integrating disparate and heterogeneous legacy systems. The problem is that the monolithic form as most of the systems were implemented turns the change excessively slow and expensive. Considering that some business logic portions are quite volatile and susceptible to changes and other portions are quite stable and less susceptible to changes, this paper proposes ontology based integrated development environment (IDE) that can capture business changes and quickly implement them into computational systems. The volatile portions are externalized as business rules and the stable portions as SOA based services. Business rules’ facts and conditions are linked to services, which are discovered in the business rules development or maintenance time. The IDE aggregates a set of tools to automate the modeling of business rules in the business people‘s terminology and to automate the integration of services. It is based on a set of ontologies to deal with metadata related to services, vocabularies and business rules. Business rules are modeled according to OMG’s Semantics of Business Vocabularies and Business Rules Metamodel.