Visual Modeling and Verbalization of Rules ∗ PhD Research Proposal

Rules are widely recognized to play an important role in the Semantic Web. They are a critical technology component for the early adoption and applications of knowledge-based techniques in e-business, especially enterprize integration and B2B e-commerce. This includes, in particular, markup languages for integrity and derivation rules, such as the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) that has been proposed as an extension of the Web ontology language OWL[8]. Rules also play an important role in information systems engineering, especially in the specification of functional requirements where business rules are the foundation for capturing and modeling business application logic. A lot of work has been conducted in the area of visual representation of business vocabularies (see Section 3). The mainstream technology is MOF/UML, which allows visualization of domain concepts by means of, for instance, UML class diagrams. On the other hand, relatively few research has been done in the area of visual rules modeling. The emerging technologies for the Semantic Web experience lack of modeling tools for visual representation of ontologies and rules. The request for a UML-based rule modeling tool for the Semantic Web comes from the industry. Many companies claim that even if they understand benefits of using Semantic Web technologies like ontologies and rule languages, it is difficult for them to start since ontology architects and rule experts are quite expensive. A UML-based rule modeling approach for the Semantic Web will facilitate the use of the Semantic Web technologies by traditional UML modelers. The actuality of the proposed research also comes from the rules standardization efforts of W3C (http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/) and OMG (http://www.omg.org), which need rules modeling methodologies and tools.