Controlled English language for production and event processing rules

Abstract

In recent years, event processing has matured from an emerging technology to one with pervasive uses in various industries. There is a growing segment of applications comprising a diversity of rule types that are developed by high-level users, who have business logic and process expertise rather than software development skills. Technical rule languages for business (production) rules systems differ from event processing rules because they target different execution modes. Corresponding differences exist in the respective rule languages employed to date. This paper describes an integrated rule language that supports both kinds of rules, thus enabling business applications that combine them. The integrated language targets non-technical "business users" who write rules that employ both production and event processing rule functions. The language proposed here is a textual "controlled natural language" based on the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) specification of the Object Management Group (OMG). We describe an implementation that uses an SBVR parser, and an SBVR "vocabulary" that defines the syntax and semantics for event processing rules. The parser treats business rule and event processing concepts indifferently, and can be extended to other language concepts by additional vocabularies. Knowledge of the event processing aspects is limited to a conversion utility that transforms rules written using this language to an event processing network. © 2011 ACM.