An approach for bridging the gap between business rules and the semantic web

Business rules should improve the human communication inside of an enterprise or between business partners and must be therefore independent of implementations in IT systems. As a long-term goal, business rules should be guaranteed by all IT applications of an enterprise. A first step to define and to standardize what business rules are is an OMG initiative to specify a metamodel for business rules and the vocabulary on which business rules are defined. The result of OMG's effort is the SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) specification that we took as starting point of our investigations to automate business rules. There are multiple ways for transforming business rules. In this paper we show how SBVR based vocabulary and rules can be translated by model transformation chains into Semantic Web Languages. In our approach we use OWL and R2ML (REWERSE Rule Markup Language). Both are languages with a high potential for a broad usage in future rule-based applications.