Modeling semantics of business rules

Organizations are showing growing interest in paradigms where business models and services compatibility is adaptively tested, e.g. by applying automatic systems to check business rules consistency. In this paper, we build on the original proposal by OMG of using first-order logics for representing business vocabularies and propose an approach based on description logics (DL) as formal logic support for business rules. By translating SBVR business vocabularies and rules into OWL DL ontologies, standard inference procedures of DL can be applied to check the business model consistency in the open-world, which is the default interpretation of SBVR models. Moreover, SBVR facts that cannot be expressed with OWL DL are translated into SWRL rules so that they can then be integrated with the starting ontology and evaluated, albeit within the boundaries of the closed-world made of known facts. We exemplify this process by translating a fragment of the EU-Rent example, drawn from the SBVR specification, into a OWL+SWRL knowledge base.