RuleCNL: A Controlled Natural Language for Business Rule Specifications
This addresses the need for clear and machine-processable business rule specifications for companies, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing CNL and SBVR approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of unambiguously expressing business rules for companies by introducing RuleCNL, a controlled natural language that aligns with business vocabulary and automatically maps to the SBVR standard, ensuring traceability and consistency.
Business rules represent the primary means by which companies define their business, perform their actions in order to reach their objectives. Thus, they need to be expressed unambiguously to avoid inconsistencies between business stakeholders and formally in order to be machine-processed. A promising solution is the use of a controlled natural language (CNL) which is a good mediator between natural and formal languages. This paper presents RuleCNL, which is a CNL for defining business rules. Its core feature is the alignment of the business rule definition with the business vocabulary which ensures traceability and consistency with the business domain. The RuleCNL tool provides editors that assist end-users in the writing process and automatic mappings into the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard. SBVR is grounded in first order logic and includes constructs called semantic formulations that structure the meaning of rules.