SBVR to OWL 2 Mappings: An Automatable and Structural-Rooted Approach

Abstract

The wide applicability of mapping business rules expressions to ontology statements have been recently recognized. Some of the most important applications are: (1) using of on- tology reasoners to prove the consistency of business domain information, (2) generation of an ontology intended to be used in the analysis stage of a software development process, and (3) the possibility of encapsulate the declarative specification of business knowledge into information software systems by means of an implemented ontology. The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) supports that approach by provid- ing business people with a linguistic way to semantically describe business concepts and specify business rules in an independent way of any information system design. Although previous work have presented some proposals, an exhaustive and automatable approach for them is still lacking. This work presents a broad and detailed set of transformations that allows the automatable generation of an ontology implemented in OWL 2 from the SBVR specifications of a business domain. Such transformations are rooted on the struc- tural specification of both standards and are depicted through a case study. A real case validation example was performed, approaching the feasibility of the mappings by the quality assessment of the developed ontology.