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W’INcubate Talent for Leadership

Authors: Angelo Corallo

25/02/05


The Business Modelling Language

@Copyright eBMS-eBusiness Management School – ISUFI – Università di Lecce - Riproduzione vietata2


BML has to support SME (as stated in strategic issue 1) BML should be enough expressive to be able to describe SME in a whatever e-business scenario, in terms of offered products or services description, agreement or contract but also in terms of organisational structure, business processes and business models.

BML has to support software SME (as stated in strategic issue 2) BML framework should allow the business analyst to capture information related to the business profile of a company in order to build a business knowledge repository, expressed in machine readable language, that is a source of fundamental information for the software requirements phase as much as for the design and implementation phase.

BML community has to involve standardisation body and open source community in BML definition (as stated in the adoption process)BML community has to involve standardisation body and open source community in BML definition and BML framework must grant, as much as possible, the compatibility with the larger number of consolidated standard, with a specific regard to the e-business sector.

BML has to allow evolution of language and to grant compatibility in time among different domain languages (as stated in the adoption process)BML framework must grant a flexible mechanism through which territories and communities could derive their own languages and vocabularies tailored to their needs; at the same time this mechanism should grant coherence in time between the different domain model or vocabulary developed allowing interaction among different local ecosystem.

Business Modelling Language Objectives



It is necessary to develop new modeling framework allowing to fill the gap between technology and organization, through which it could be possible to model business knowledge, representing the way a company works, in a language as much as possible similar to the language business experts use and at the same time as much as possible formal in order to orient and guide all the life cycle of the technological components, from its inception to its development to the management to the evolution.

One of the main obstacles in the adoption of digital technologies from organizations and communities depends on the divide between technological solution, which has reached a quite high level of maturity and the methodologies and technologies enabling business processes, and knowledge modeling. These methodologies and technologies are on one hand not enough connected with software development and management processes and on the other poorly usable and understandable from business users.

PHYSICAL ARCHITECTURE

PLATFORM Service Registry

Service Ontology

Domain Model PROCESS MODELLING

BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS

The divide between technology and business knowledge



BML is thought to capture and model business knowledge in an easy way, in order to make it available for software tools supporting the business.

Objective: to make DBE platform more accessible to business people and, in particular, to those involved in SMEs. A direct action in business modelling by organizational people could be the right way in order to obtain more flexible and effective solutions;

in particular, this should allow:1. bridging the existing gap between technology and organization: business

models could be designed in a business-oriented perspective, obtaining actual CIMs that preserve formality and rigorousness needed by technology;

2. reducing costs related to ad hoc solutions development: if part of the development process is performed by business people IT professionals could focus on different activities or they can save time and effort overcoming communication problems.

Business Modelling Language



BML as a language to exchange business knowledge

DirectoryService

Business layer

Natural language editor

Business expert Business Description

XMI

Natural Language

Developers

MOF

MOF

Develop Service, Deploy it and register in the

Directory Service

Service

Service

Service

Service List corresponding to Business needs

Transaction 4

DESIGN TIME RUN TIME

BML can be used to create a new business layer for service architecture, allowing the use of the same languages for both software design and development and for e-business partners selection.

Search engine



WSDL: Technical and functional Service Interface description (No semantics);

OWL-S Grounding: Technical descriptionPSM

PIM

CIM

OWL-S Profile: Semantic Service Description

OWL-S Process: Semantic Process Description

UDDI T-MODEL: Business description in terms of contact, address and standard taxonomy references;

The widely recognised description languages related with SOA is WSDL which is mainly devoted to service computational representation. UDDI T-model can be considered a CIM but is poor of semantics and does not allow a real business knowledge exchange. Recent efforts in the W3C consortium have been produced what is called Semantic Web Service approach; through a semantic web service approach, mainly based on OWL-S it is possible to extend the service description, but such description is mainly a semantic annotation, based on domain knowledge representation, of the computational description.

In other words, none of the SOA languages is a CIM and allows real exchange of business knowledge.

It is necessary to develop a layer, more business oriented, based on CIM language enabling real business knowledge representation and exchange.

Existing Standard for Service Description in SOA



BML as a language to support software development

Model

BusinessModel

SystemModel

LogicalModel

PhysicalModel

RequirementsModel

ComputationalModel

PlatformSpecific

Platformindepndent

Abstract class

Concrete class

CIM

BML should be thought in relation with technology enabling the improvement of productivity in software development and an increased quality, and longevity of the software developed. In such context BML would be a Computer Independent Model in MDA framework.



CIM (Computation Independent Business Model) represents the concerns of business owners, managers, agents and employees in the models. Anything business people have to say in the models goes in the CIM. Above all, CIM modelling must be easy for non-technical business people to understand and use. The salient feature of CIM languages is their reliance on and formal use of natural language.

MDA (Model Driven Architecture) is about using modelling languages as programming languages rather than merely as design languages.

Programming with modelling languages can improve the productivity, quality, and longevity outlook.

The MDA requires the definition of different level in modelling representation (M0 to M3) and different model from CIM to code.

MDA and the Computational Independent Model



Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules




The Rule based approach

1The Business Rules Group, July 2000, Defining Business Rules ~ What Are They Really?, Final Report, revision 1.3

The Rule based approach came out in the 80s mainly from the work of the “Business Rules Group”. A rule-based approach can be described as a way “for identifying and articulating the rules which define the structure and control the operation of an enterprise”1; it represents a new way to think about enterprise and its rules, in order to enable a complete business representation made by and for business people.

Rules could play a very important role in defining business semantics: they can influence or guide behaviours and support policies, responding to environmental situations and events. This means that rules represent the primary means by which an organization can direct its business, defining the operative way to reach its objectives and perform its actions.

OMG in its Architecture of Business Modeling is developing an implementation of the business rules approach called “Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules” (SBVR)



The OMG Business Model Architecture

2Stan Hendryx, Hendryx & Associates, Architecture of Business Modelling, November 14, 2003

OMG, in the widest effort of the Model Driven Architecture, is developing a framework called Business Model Architecture in order to model any kind of human work activity, in any domain, in language familiar to domain experts2. Business Model Architecture is based on high level meta-model, that constitute the abstract syntax of the framework and on Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules that represents the concrete syntax.

Such approach allows the evolution in time of vocabularies and rules in different domains, granting simple mapping among domains and semantic integrations between communities;

OMG issued Business Semantics of Business Rule (BSBR) Request For Proposal, in order to create a standard “to allow business people to define the policies and rules by which they run their business in their own language, in terms of the things they deal with in the business, and to capture those rules in a way that is clear, unambiguous and readily translatable into other representations”.



Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules

Among the most interesting features that Business Modelling proposes we can consider:SBVR is an innovative language based on a fact-oriented approach allowing semantic interoperability between models and tools in heterogeneous environment;SBVR allows the production of business vocabularies and rules; vocabulary plus rules constitute a shared domain model with the same expressive power of standard ontological languages; SBVR allows multilingual development, since it is based on separation between symbols and concepts; SBVR has to enable making business rules accessible to software tools, including tools that support the business experts in creating, finding, validating, and managing business rules, and tools that support the information technology experts in converting business rules into implementation rules for automated systems.SBVR provides interchange capabilities defining MOF/XMI mapping rules, that enable generating MOF-compliant models and XML schema.SBVR proposes Structured English as one of possibly many notations that can map to the SVBR Metamodel.



Methodologies used in software developing, are typically applied only when a problem is already formulated and well described. The actual difficulty lies in the previous step, that is describing problems and expected functionalities.

Stakeholders involved in software development can express their ideas using a language very close to them, but they usually are not able to formalize these concepts in a clear and unambiguous way.

This implies a large effort in order to interpret and understand real meanings and concepts hidden among stakeholders words. Special constraints on syntax or predefined linguistic structures can be used in order to overcome this problem, enabling natural language to well represent and formally define problems and requirements.

The main purpose of natural language modelling is hence to make natural language suitable for conceptual modelling. The focus is on semantic aspects and shared meanings, while syntax is thought in a perspective based on formal logic mapping.

Natural Language Modelling



Rules play a very important role in defining business semantics: they can influence or guide behaviours and support policies, responding to environmental situations and events. This means that rules represent the primary means by which an organization can direct its business, defining the operative way to reach its objectives and perform its actions.

Rule-based approach



The rule-based approach aims to address two different kinds of users: •it addresses business communities, in order to provide them with a structured approach, based on a clear set of concepts and used to access and manage business rules; • it addresses IT professionals, in order to provide them with a deep understanding about business rules and to help them in models creation.

Rule-based approach



“rules build on facts, and facts build on concepts as expressed by terms” (Business Rules Group, Business Rules Manifesto - The Principles of Rule Independence, Nov. 2003)

Fact-orientation

People communicate facts, that is the fact is the atomic unit of communication.

The fact-oriented approach enables multidimensional categorization; The fact-oriented approach supports time changeability; The fact-oriented approach provides semantic stability; The fact-oriented approach enables extensibility and reuse.

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