RECON - A Controlled English for Business Rules

Capturing business rules in a formal logic representation supports the enterprise in two important ways: it enables the evaluation of logs and audit records for conformance to, or violation of, the rules; and it enables the conforming automation of some enterprise activities. The problem is that formal logic representations of the rules are very difficult for an industry expert to read and even more difficult to write, and translating the natural language of the enterprise to formal logic is an unsolved problem. RECON – Restricted English for Constructing Ontologies – is a subset of English that can be easily read by an industry expert, while having a formal grammar and an unambiguous translation to formal logic. This paper describes the principal features of the RECON language, with examples, and shows the corresponding formal logic constructs that are produced by the RECON tool.