A set of ontology design patterns for reengineering SBVR statements into OWL/SWRL ontologies

Abstract

The interest in the use of ontologies for creating more intelligent and effective enterprise information systems has increased considerably in recent years. The most critical aspects during the development of these systems are: (1) to identify the ontology concepts and (2) to make explicit the business rules by means of the ontology axioms. In order to address these issues, mappings of business rules expressions to ontology statements based on different languages were proposed. Despite the efforts made in this area, some work remain to be done. This work presents a set of ontology design patterns providing a way to obtain an OWL/SWRL ontology by applying metamodel transformation rules over the SBVR specification of a business domain. Patterns are rooted in the structural specification of the standards, providing a set of mappings readily usable for business people or developers concerned with the implementation of a mapping tool. Moreover, translations from SBVR to SWRL language are presented in order to fill the gap in the expressive power of SBVR and OWL. The theoretical expressions of patterns are illustrated by means of an example depicting the core structure of a fictitious company.