ONTORULE: from business knowledge to ontology- and rules-based applications

The development of a business rule application involves many different people, from the business owners of the rules to the IT developers of the application. It also involves many different kinds of knowledge, from the trade and organisation specific vocabularies to the inside working of the inference engines.

In the recent years, advances in standardization of modeling and knowledge representation languages and in methodologies and theoretical foundations for policy acquisition and execution made it increasingly feasible to reduce the coupling between policies and their implementations, and to empower users to independently interact with the part of a business application that is relevant to them, including the decision modeling process

The objective of ONTORULE is to enable users, from business executives over business analysts to IT developers, to interact in their own way with the part of a business application that is relevant to them.

We believe that one essential step towards achieving that objective is the ability to separate cleanly the domain ontology from the actual business rules, on the one hand; and the representation of the knowledge from its operationalization in IT applications, on the other hand.

Leading vendors of knowledge-based and business rules management systems and top research institutions join their efforts, in the EC-funded ONTORULE project The ONTORULE project is partially funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement n° 231875., to develop the integrated technology that will empower business professionals in the knowledge economy of the future.

Today, the development of business rules application is usually approached with a heavy IT bias, if only because it starts, most often, with the specification of the application data model.

Starting with the application data model has at least two negative consequences, from the ONTORULE point of view:

1. part of the domain knowledge is embedded into the implementation dependent data model;

2. the part of the domain knowledge that cannot be fit into the data model end up being mixed with the operational rules.

The implementation dependent representation of the domain knowledge is not easily accessible to its business owner, nor to the business user in general. As a consequence, starting with the application data model amounts to transfer the ownership (maintenance, evolution) of the domain knowledge to the IT department.

On the other hand, the absence of a clean separation between the conceptual and structural domain knowledge and the operational business rules makes sharing and re-use more difficult, because they have different scopes; it makes maintenance and evolution more risky, because they have different life cycles; and it makes the different kinds and forms of knowledge less accessible to their respective owners.

The ONTORULE project is motivated by the belief that the development of business rule applications must start from the business knowledge, not from the IT application. If the knowledge is to be owned by the business user, it must be based on the business user's own concepts and vocabulary. The approach must support the acquisition of the knowledge from business people and policy documents, and its maintenance and management by business people for business people.

The other key is to keep the conceptual domain model separate from the business policies and from the operational rules for acquisition, maintenance and re-use purposes, but to recombine them effectively in applications.

ONTORULE puts semantic technologies to action to build effective bridges between the textual sources, the less structured and less formal representations that are preferred by the business users, and the different kinds of formal knowledge that computers can process, thus empowering the various business users and the IT developers to manage change and complexity.