Žinių naudojimo verslo informacinėse sistemose tyrimas

Abstract

In the research of the business IS development the business rules approach has achieved a lot of attention and already has a steady niche with a strong motivation behind. The usefulness of the approach and its advantages over the traditional IS development approaches call for the technology standards. Despite the work done towards standardization there is still a way to go – commercial products use their unique modeling languages for business rules, most of their rules processing and enforcement engines are stand-alone, even the embeddable ones use their unique rules representation format. In our research focusing on the business rules we have stepped towards employing the widely spread technology of active databases and have argued that it is feasible and possible to model business rules using conceptual graphs. Such a model having representations in visual and textual form (linear form and CGIF) and the possibility to translate the model to the near natural English language can be used both at conceptual and implementation levels. We have designed and implemented the automatic trigger generation component. Using the representative example from the real business organization (the representative example was comprised of structural domain knowledge and corresponding business rules) we have carried out the experiment during which the business rules model was transformed from visual notation to CGIF, then from CGIF to XML, and then from XML to MS SQL Server trigger. The experiment results have proven that using the proposed modeling language – conceptual graphs – with the proposed extension can be used for business rules modelling and the resulting business rules model can be successfully employed for automatic business rules model implementation using active databases. The advantages of the approach are several: 1. Business rules modeling language – conceptual graphs – is flexible and usable at different levels of practical IS development activities; 2. Business rules repository in XML format offers extension points and rules exchange / sharing possibilities; 3. The wide spread technology of active databases is used for rules enforcement instead of dedicated technologies and tools thus easing incorporation of the approach into the real business applications.