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A Usable Interchange Format for Rich Syntax Rules Integrating OCL, Ruleml and SWRL

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A Usable Interchange Format for Rich Syntax Rules Integrating OCL, Ruleml and SWRL A Usable Interchange Format for Rich Syntax Rules Integrating OCL, RuleML and SWRL Gerd Wagner Adrian Giurca Sergey Lukichev Institute of Informatics Institute of Informatics Institute of Informatics Brandenburg University of Brandenburg University of Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus Technology at Cottbus Technology at Cottbus 03046 Walther Pauer Str.2, 03046 Walther Pauer Str.2, 03046 Walther Pauer Str.2, Cottbus, Germany Cottbus, Germany Cottbus, Germany [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT on the Web and in other distributed systems. They allow Rules are becoming increasingly important in business mod- deploying, executing, publishing and communicating rules eling and requirements engineering, and as a high level pro- in a network. They may also play the role of a lingua franca gramming paradigm. In the area of rule modeling there for exchanging rules between different systems and tools. In are different developer communities like UML modelers and a narrow sense, a rule markup language is a concrete (XML- ontology architects. The former use rules in business mod- based) rule syntax for the Web. In a broader sense, it should eling and in software development, while the latter use rules have an abstract syntax as a common basis for defining vari- in collaborative Web applications. Each of them is using ous concrete languages serving different purposes. The main different rule languages and tools. Since a business rule is purposes of a rule markup language is to permit reuse, in- the same rule no matter in which language it is formalized, terchange and publication of rules. it is important to support the interchange of rules between We adopt the Model Driven Architecture (MDA,[8]), which different systems and tools. is a framework for distinguishing different abstraction lev- This paper presents an interchange format for rules inte- els defined by the Object Management Group (OMG), [11]. grating the Rule Markup Language (RuleML), the Seman- As illustrated in Figure 1, we consider rules at the three tic Web Rule Language (SWRL) and the Object Constraint abstraction levels defined be the MDA: Language (OCL). These languages provide a rich syntax for At the (’computation-independent’) business do- expressing rules. This means that they support conceptual main level (called CIM in OMG’s MDA), rules are state- distinctions, such as distinguishing different types of terms ments that express (certain parts of) a business/domain pol- and different types of atoms, which are not present in stan- icy (e.g., defining terms of the domain language or defining/ dard predicate logic. The interchange format is usable in the constraining domain operations) in a declarative manner, sense that it allows structure-preserving markup of all con- typically using a natural language or a visual language. Ex- structs of these different languages and does not force users amples of such rules are: to translate their rule expressions to a completely different • ”The driver of a rental car must be at least 25 years language paradigm such as having to transform a function old” into a functional predicate. In the case of OCL rules this is achieved by developing a logical reconstruction of the ’un- • ”A gold customer is a customer with more than $1Mil- logical’ original OCL metamodel. lion on deposit” We consider three kinds of rules in this paper: integrity rules, derivation rules and production rules. We define rule • ”An investment is exempt from tax on profit if the concepts with the help of MOF/UML, a subset of the UML stocks have been bought more than a year ago” class modeling language proposed by the Object Manage- ment Group (OMG) for the purpose of ’meta-modeling’, i.e. • ”When a share price drops by more than 5% and the for defining languages conceptually on the level of an ab- investment is exempt from tax on profit, then sell it” stract (semi-visual) syntax. At the platform-independent operational design level Keywords (called PIM in OMG’s MDA), rules are formal statements, expressed in some formalism or computational paradigm, Rules, rule markup languages, integrity rules derivation rules, which can be directly mapped to executable statements of a production rules, rule metamodels, OCL, RuleML, SWRL software system. Examples of rule languages at this level are SQL:1999 [15], OCL 2.0 [10] and DOM Level 3 Event Listen- 1. INTRODUCTION ers [6]. Remarkably, SQL provides operational constructs for Rule markup languages will be the vehicle for using rules all three business rule categories mentioned above: checks and assertions operationalize a notion of integrity rules, views Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). WWW2006, May 22–26, 2006, Edinburgh, UK. operationalize a notion of derivation rules, and triggers op- . erationalize a notion of reaction rules. Rule CIM IntegrityRule DerivationRule ReactionRule ProductionRule TransformationRule ECAPRule ECARule PIM OCL2.0Invariant R2ML:IntegrityRule R2ML::DerivationRule SQL1999Assertion SQL1999View SQL1999Trigger R2ML:ReactionRule R2ML:ProductionRule PSM Oracle10gSQLView XSB2.6PrologRule MSOutLook6Rule ILOGRule Jess3.4Rule XSL1.0Rule Figure 1: Rule concepts at three different abstraction levels: computation-independent (CIM), platform- independent (PIM) and platform-specific (PSM) modeling. At the platform-specific implementation level (called 2. CONTENT LANGUAGE PSM in OMG’s MDA), rules are statements in a language of Logical formulas and rules are expressed with the help of a specific execution environment, such as Oracle 10g views logical connectives on the basis of a content language con- [12], Jess 3.4 [7], XSB 2.6 Prolog [18] or the Microsoft Out- sisting of a datatype language and a user-defined content look 6 Rule Wizard [9]. vocabulary. Rule interchange will be important both at the PIM and the PSM level. So, there are four interchange types: 2.1 Datatype Language The datatype language consists of a set of predefined datatype PIM to PIM examples: OCL to SQL, SQL to ISO Prolog. names, including the name rdfs:Literal standing for the generic datatype of all Unicode strings. Each predefined PIM to/from PSM examples: OCL to/from Java, SQL datatype name is associated with: to/from Oracle 10g. • a set of data literals, which are Unicode strings; PSM to PSM examples: XSB Prolog to SWI Prolog, ILOG • a set of datatype function names; to ILOG, ILOG to Jess. • a set of datatype predicate names. General purpose rule interchange formats, such as RuleML 2.2 Content Vocabulary Constructs and R2ML, address the PIM level. They support a PSM to PSM interchange via the PIM level. Since there will be The user-defined content vocabulary includes several rule interchange formats, there is also the issue of • user-defined object names; mapping them on each other. In general, a rule interchange will not be loss-free. For • user-defined object function names comprising role instance, since RuleML cannot represent several linguistic function names and object property names; distinctions made in OCL and SWRL, an OCL to SWRL interchange is not well supported by RuleML, while R2ML • user-defined data function names comprising at- allows a loss-free interchange. tributes and data operations; We assume that Web rule languages do not directly follow the tradition of predicate-logic-style rule languages such as • user-defined noun concept names standing for gen- Prolog, but rather follow the recent developments of Web eral noun concepts, among which we distinguish object knowledge representation languages such as RDF [13] and types (’classes’) and datatypes; OWL [16]. This requires that they accommodate: • user-defined verb concept names, called ’predicate symbols’ in traditional logic, standing for general verb • Web naming concepts, such as URIs/IRIs and XML concepts, or predicates, among which we distinguish namespaces, properties and associations; properties are either at- tributes, if they are data-valued, or reference proper- • The ontological distinction between objects and data ties, if they are object-valued. values, In Web languages such as RDF and OWL, all these names • The datatype concepts of RDF. are globally unique standard identifiers in the form of URI references. One of the goals of R2ML is to comply with As a working name for our interchange format, we use the important Semantic Web standards like RDF(S) and OWL. acronym R2ML standing for REWERSE Rule Markup Lan- In particular, R2ML accommodates the data type concept guage. of RDF. * rental car /is available at /available car Term production year arguments age() * ObjectOperationTerm getLastRental() * 0..1 rented car 1 * ObjectTerm is assigned to contextArgument Operation contextArgument 1 operationID : URIRef is stored at storage branch0..1 1 return branch rental ObjectName * ObjectVariable RoleFunctionTerm reservation date objectID : URIRef branch * /discount 1 * start date 0..1 * Class ReferenceProperty 1 pick up branch classID : URIRef refPropertyID : URIRef 0..1 1 * Figure 2: Object terms Figure 4: Sample vocabulary 1..* {ordered} 2.2.3 User-Defined Noun Concepts Term DataTerm dataArguments User-defined noun concepts comprise classes (or object arguments * {ordered} types) and user-defined datatypes including enumerations. DataLiteral DataVariable lexicalValue : UnicodeString 2.2.4 User-Defined Verb Concepts * 0..1 DataFunctionTerm User-defined verb concepts comprise properties and as- Datatype PlainLiteral TypedLiteral sociations. Properties are either attributes, if they are datatypeID : URIRef languageTag[0..1] : UnicodeString type : URIRef data-valued, or reference properties, if they are object-valued. Notice that we use an attribute name both as the name of a function and as the name of the corresponding functional DataOperationTerm AttributeFunctionTerm DatatypeFunctionTerm 1 predicate. Likewise, we use a reference property name both * * * 1 contextArgument1 1 as the name of a property predicate and as the name of the Operation contextArgument operationID : URIRef ObjectTerm Attribute DatatypeFunction corresponding role function. This kind of naming liberty, 1 attributeID : URIRef datatypeFunctionID : URIRef which is supported by RDF and Common Logic, helps to switch between functional and relational languages.
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