ONTORULE · ONTOlogies meet business RULEs

The objective of ONTORULE is to enable the right people to interact in their own way with the right part of their business application: different people with different requirements and background, ranging from business executives to IT developers, have to interact in different ways with different aspects of a business application, to use, control and manage it. We believe that this can be achieved by cleanly separating the domain ontology from the actual business rules; and the representation of the knowledge from its IT implementation. The vocabulary required to express the business rules, and the underlying ontology, must be acquired from the natural language sources; the rules must be authored, using that vocabulary, by the owner of the business policies; the data models for the IT applications must be designed by IT developers based on the application requirements. The relevant people in the organisation must be able to manage and maintain Ontologies, business rules and data models separately, without having to care about maintaining the others items. To implement the rules in the business application, the ontology must be mapped onto the application's data model and the rules operationalised accordingly. ONTORULE aims to develop and integrate all the required pieces of knowledge and technology to allow the acquisition of ontologies and rules from the most appropriate sources, including natural language documents; their separate management and maintenance; and their transparent operationalisation in IT applications. To achieve that objective, ONTORULE will deliver: - An integrating modelling and acquisition framework, based on the OMG SBVR standard and NLP technology - Usable ownership and management systems to empower the business owner of rules and ontology - Execution and inference engines to combine ontology and rule-based reasoning usefully and efficiently - End-to-end pilot applications to show the feasibility and added value of ONTORULE.