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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>Total</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>A Systematic Review of Methods for Consistency Checking in SBVR-based Business Rules</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Sayandeep Mitra</string-name>
          <email>mitra.sayandeep@tcs.com</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Pavan Kumar Chittimalli</string-name>
          <email>pavan.chittimalli@tcs.com</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Tata Research Development and Design Centre, TCS Innovation Labs</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Pune</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="IN">India</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2007</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>3</volume>
      <issue>5</issue>
      <abstract>
        <p>Business enterprises in today's world have complex rules and process as their foundation. The rules and processes continuously change to re ect the enterprise's evolution and progress, market demands and regulations. This constant ux demands an automatic way to check these business rules for correctness and consistency. In the recent times, few methods were proposed for automated checks. In our literature review for this subject matter, however, we did not nd a proper survey, which could present a consolidated picture of the properties, advantages and drawbacks of the di erent methods. The randomly scattered state of art for specifying business rules and analyzing them for inconsistencies is hindering the relevant research space. We conduct a systematic literature review of various solutions discussed in the eld of consistency checking for business rules, especially rules in Semantics of Business Vocabularies and Rules (SBVR) format. We highlight the progress made in the eld, aspects that can be developed further, and the current gaps in the methods so that future work can be channelized to address and close the gaps by proposing new or enhanced methods.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1. INTRODUCTION</title>
      <p>Business Rules are operational regulations, decision rules
that a business organization follows to perform certain
activities. The business rules are usually embodied in the
system artefacts such as governing policies, guidelines,
operating procedures, legacy source code, etc. Operationally, the
business rules may be implemented in the source code of
the running systems, and their parameters (if the rules are
parametrized) are usually stored in a database or in
datales or con guration les.</p>
      <p>Both humans and information systems are involved in
business operations, with the corresponding business rules
Copyright c 2017 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted
for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its
editors.
spread across the enterprise in various forms (policy
documents, operational procedures and in the source code of the
information systems). Market conditions and external
regulatory reasons are the causes behind changes to the business
structure, policies, and strategies. Business transformation
is a process of adjusting the business activities to
accommodate the above changes. The ageing business information
systems may also require changes in order to respond to
changing business environment, i.e., competition and
superior business products and services. Both IT transformation
and business transformation force the enterprises to revisit
their business rules, pushing forward the need for automatic
testing of business rules.</p>
      <p>
        Over the last few decades, in the eld of business
knowledge, a number of works have been proposed, dealing with
extraction of business rules from information systems and
gathering business information from text documents.
Certain aspects of the domain, however, are still in need of
answers. Among them, the following are the research topics
based on mined business rules:
1. How complete and correct are the extracted business
rules with respect to the source of the business rules?
2. Are the extracted or manually created business rules
inconsistent with each other?
3. What can be the preferred notation for representing
extracted knowledge or mined rules from multiple sources?
A few notable works [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref10 ref17 ref3 ref9">9, 10, 17, 3, 1</xref>
        ] have been done to
address (2) and (3). However, to the best of our knowledge,
there is no proper literature review present, which reviews
all the works addressing the above mentioned research
problems. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review
of works which aims to study the mappings of the
knowledge represented in the form of business rules to a format
which identify inconsistencies / redundancies among
business rules. In this survey, we consider business rules which
are represented in Semantics of Business Vocabularies and
Rules (SBVR) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ]. The idea to go with only SBVR
representation for this survey, is because of the immense
popularity SBVR has garnered in recent years, and its strong
theoretical foundation in formal logic [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        A set of documents were published by OMG, grouped
under the Business Modeling &amp; Integration Domain Task Force
(BEIDTF) project [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ], as a solution to the representation
to the business rules. The SBVR model has been presented
as result of the request for proposal on Business
Semantics of Business Rules (BSBR) made by OMG, which is a
part of the business model layer in the Model Driven
Architecture (MDA). The purpose of SBVR is to describe
formally and without ambiguities the semantics of a business
model, in turn bene ting business analysts and modelers,
as well as business vocabulary and rules administrators and
software tool developers. SBVR [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ] works as a bridge
between business and IT people, aiming to provide a way to
express business knowledge (requirements, operational
procedures etc.) to the IT people unambiguously using natural
language. SBVR meta-model is used to represent business
knowledge as:
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-1-1">
        <title>1. Specifying business vocabularies.</title>
        <p>2. Specifying business rules.</p>
        <p>
          Organizations or communities specify the conduct of
business using a cohesive set of interconnected concepts known
as Business vocabulary. These concepts are entities
represented through name, term, and verb. The fact is expressed
as relation between these concepts. SBVR Structured
English (SSE) is a popular textual representation of SBVR,
providing the option to write business rules in plain
English. The categorization of SBVR meta-model includes
tokens and keywords. A token is a place holder for `text'
associated with name, term, and verb in the SBVR
metamodel. The keywords are added to facts in order to create
rules [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
          ].
        </p>
        <p>The rest of the paper is arranged as follows. In Section
2 we present the setup of the survey, which includes the
Research Questions that form the structure of the survey,
followed by the Study Quality Assessment metrics and the
overview of the survey. Section 3 contains the summary of
the works under review. Section 4 and 5 presents the Results
&amp; Discussions and Conclusion respectively.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. SETUP OF THE SURVEY</title>
      <p>In this section, we present the setup of the survey
conducted. In order to follow a systematic approach, we
identi ed few research questions that needed to be answered
in a measured manner during this survey. At the end we
also present the metrics that we have followed for the study
quality assessment of the survey. We believe that the strong
setup shall enable us to review the concerned literature in
an organized and compact manner.
2.1</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Research Questions</title>
      <p>In order to undertake the systematic literature review, we
frame the following research questions, based on the
current status of the work done in the eld of business rules
represented using SBVR metamodel, after they have been
extracted from the source code or speci cation documents.
RQ1: What are the analyzable model forms that
SBVRbased business rules are converted into?
RQ2: How are the underlying theoretical foundations of
SBVR utilized?
RQ3: What are the existing gaps in present solutions and
possible opportunities for future research?</p>
      <p>SBVR has a sound theoretical foundation of formal logic,
underpinning both logical formulation and the structures of
bodies of shared meanings. SBVR meta model has inherent
support to First Order Logic (FOL). It is a Control
Natural Language (CNL) with restricted user de ned business
vocabularies. The following are the key di erences or
additions to FOL to support SBVR:</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>SBVR supports restricted quanti cation (at most, at</title>
        <p>least ) while FOL is built on existential and universal
quanti cation.</p>
        <p>SBVR supports modal logic (deontic and alethic), which
FOL lacks.</p>
        <p>The need to model SBVR into a knowledge
representation, is because of the wide reach of FOL in the current
research world, in terms of the number of solvers as well
as their strength. Since the aim is to automatically infer
from the business rules, the selection of knowledge base is
an important step in the process.</p>
        <p>The Utilization of represented knowledge form is varied as
per the domain and company. Business institutions presently
are demanding automatic consistency checks on their
business rules and performing knowledge querying on the
business rules. Automatic consistency checks on the business
rules aims at identifying con icts and/ or redundancies in
the business rules (if any). Another popular aspect is
Knowledge Querying, the process of retrieving desired information
from the given business rules.</p>
        <p>Our work aims to identify the present methods proposed
for the problem of automatic consistency checking for
business rules represented in SBVR format, assess their
performance and their shortcomings. We de ne this as our
problem statement throughout the paper. Through this, we
aim to highlight the existing gaps between the proposed
solutions and the desired solutions in the particular research
area mentioned earlier and possible opportunities for future
research.
2.2</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Study Quality Assessment</title>
      <p>Although there is no commonly agreed de nition of study
\quality", it could be assessed by constructing a check-list
of factors that need to be evaluated for each study. To aid
this, we mark a work based on the following three aspects:
(1) Evaluation of Proposed Approach.
(2) Automation level of the Proposed Approach.
(3) De nition of the Proposed Approach.</p>
      <p>The study was conducted by rst collecting the relevant
works from various online repositories. The search string
permuted on the major words pertaining to our problem
statement, e.g., SBVR, Business Rules, consistency,
mappings, transformations, formalisation. The search across
the various repositories returned a number of results, whose
abstracts and de nitions were scanned to reduce the nal
basket of primary studies under review to nine categories.</p>
      <p>We classify the primary studies according to their
publication year and type. The results are presented in Table
1. We review each of the primary studies in regards to the
research questions proposed in Section 2. In the following
section, we summarize each primary study, highlighting their
approaches, contribution and drawbacks.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>3. SUMMARY OF THE PRIMARY STUDIES</title>
      <p>
        The work of Ceravolo et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] is one of the rst works
to represent business rules in a formal knowledge
representation with the aim of using available reasoners to identify
inconsistencies. The authors model SBVR rules to OWL
Description Logic (DL). However, DL is not expressive enough,
thus the rest of rules are modelled using Horn Rules
expressed in the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL)
formalism, with undecidability arising while reasoning with
respect to Open World Assumption (OWA). The paper
suggests a prototype application like Hoolet to reason about
OWL+SWRL, or adopting Prolog-like languages to infer
from knowledge represented as rules in Closed World
Assumptions(CWA), with the drawback of of complex
executions and loss of information. The paper falls short of clear
and distinct mapping from SBVR to OWL DL, also
lacking a concrete example showing consistency checking with
the aid of the transformed formal knowledge bases, however
creating a base for future works.
      </p>
      <p>
        Denilson dos Santos Guimara~es et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] proposes a new
approach by translating business rules into Alloy model [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ].
Alloy is a language for describing structures and a tool for
exploring them, supported by an Analyzer. The mentioned
mappings of Business Rules into Alloy model are not
described and shown in the paper, and that is a serious
drawback. An initial Business Model is created in Alloy with the
aid of a domain conceptual model created from the rule set,
after which rules are added to the model one by one. After
every addition, the analyzer tries to nd a valid example for
the model. If no such examples are found, then the model is
said to be inconsistent. The con icting rule is found by
creating a test predicate containing the disjunction of the rule
and the possibly con icting rule, and then checking for
consistency. If the model becomes consistent, then the rules are
con icting, highlighting lack of automation. Thus, if there
are n rules present in the model, addition of the (n + 1)th
rule creates an inconsistency, in order to nd the con
icting rule, we have to execute the same approach n number
of times in the worst case. The case where multiple rules
create an inconsistency is not mentioned. The redundancy
is handled in a near similar fashion, with a new assertion
being created with the rule and the negation of the possibly
redundant rule. If counterexamples are found, then the rule
is proven to be redundant. This approach also su ers from
the drawback of lack of automation mentioned earlier. This
work remains one of the few to try to identify redundancies.
      </p>
      <p>
        The following four publications are work of the same
research group. The rst paper Karpovic and Nemuraite [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]
presents the groundwork for the complete work ow. It
presents the basic concepts of the SBVR meta model,
followed by the basic concepts of the OWL 2.0 meta model,
aiming at drawing out the viability of the transformations.
Transformations for four di erent SBVR concept types are
presented, with graphical examples and explanations
provided for all of them. Among the fact type roles, N-ary
associative fact type role is mentioned to be needing special
consideration as there is no direct mappings to OWL 2.0.
The second paper [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] from the work ow, presents 23 di
erent mappings from SBVR concepts to OWL2, with the aid of
a running example, aiming to provide consistent ontologies.
The paper presents requirements for SBVR Business Rules
in order to produce consistent ontologies, e ectively putting
a few constraints on the expressibility of the Business rules.
One such example of a constraint is that in order to have
inverse properties in the OWL2 vocabulary, dedicated alethic
SBVR rules needs to be explicitly de ned. Another example
is forcing business rules to be de ned in a way that
inferences should never result in making individual instances of
several non-inferable concepts, by limiting each individual
concept to be an instance of exactly one most speci c
selfstanding primitive concept. Even though, it is mentioned
that the transformations have been done aiming at
reasoning and querying, the latter tasks are not shown. Thus,
there is no metric to check the relevance or completeness of
their transformations.
      </p>
      <p>
        The presentation of [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ] is similar to the previous paper,
illustrating a number of mappings, with detailed explanation.
This work, however focuses on describing reversible
transformations between SBVR and OWL2, deviating from the
earlier one way mappings of SBVR to OWL2. Once again some
restrictions are highlighted out, e.g., ObjectProperty axioms
must be simple properties, along with satisfying the
restrictions on the property hierarchy for avoiding cyclic
dependencies. We feel these constraints can a ect the representation
of SBVR vocabulary and rules in a real life scenario. Similar
to [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ], no application has been shown of the generated
ontologies. The nal paper [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ] acts as a survey between all the
works on transforming SBVR to OWL2, with results
indicating that the work done by the group is the most complete
and relevant transformations that have been proposed. The
group claims that they have completed 69 di erent
mappings, 51 of which have been implemented. They also point
out which SBVR concepts have been mapped wrongly or
have not been mapped in the other comparable works,
followed by experimental results, which show, the relevancy of
the transformations. This comparison shows the e
ectiveness of the SBVR extensions that have been proposed by
the group and the viability of consistency check using the
transformed ontologies. Nine di erent vocabulary and rules
are selected, two of them are in English and the rest are in
Lithuanian The idea of precision and recall is used to
represent the score in the results. The relevancy computation is
not properly explained, i.e, the phrase relevant
transformations to OWL2 elements raises the questions of what makes
a transformation relevant and irrelevant among the executed
transformations. Also, the strength of the proposed
extensions is presented for only one of the English vocabulary
and rule set, while the Loan Vocabulary did not use even
one extension, even though it is more complex of the two.
      </p>
      <p>
        Reynares et al.[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] presents the formal transformations
from SBVR to OWL2, followed by examples for a few of
them. The transformations appear a bit redundant, i.e,
most of the transformations have been presented in the
related works, with most of them covering the basic concepts
of SBVR, lacking how to deal with complex SBVR rules.
Some of the examples provided are unclear [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] and fails to
explain the signi cance of is role of in the ontology, how
it is to be identi ed, and the presence of two
SubObjectPropertyOf. In the same example, the transformations for
Universal Quanti cation and Existential Quanti cation are
presented. However, the transformation criteria for both are
given to be same, which is extremely confusing. There is a
lack of clarity regarding the categorization and segmentation
scheme. The example used for illustrating segmentation is
presented as categorization with the introduction of
DisjointClasses. The paper scores with presenting the Ontology
Quality Assessment that is performed using OQuaRE. A
case study is designed, where, a document speci ed in
natural language is converted to SBVR and then transformed
to OWL2, using the transformations provided before. The
quality measurement is described in detail, following
snapshots of a few transformations. The aim of this experiment
is to show that the transformed ontologies has good
quality and can be used for further computations. This quality
measurement is one of the rst work in this eld, and is a
novel presentation. However, the Student Fellowship rule
set is very small, and covers only the basic SBVR cases.
So the good quality measurement in the experiment is
expected. However, as the authors mention, the experiment
aims to justify the transformations provided and show that
there is scope, rather than the e ciency. The other
obvious drawback is that no work is shown, which deals with
the e ciency of the transformed ontologies, in the eld of
consistency checking or query management of SBVR rules,
keeping the question alive that how e ciently the generated
ontologies can be used for knowledge management.
      </p>
      <p>
        The work done by Kendall and Linehan [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ] presents a set
of transformations from SBVR to OWL2 elements and
annotations, aiming to provide a di erent method for transferring
SBVR among tools, than the traditional method of using the
XMI based format. The focus of the transformations is on
the representation of the ontologies rather than their
utilization, thus the use of annotations, which makes the
resulting ontologies not favorable for consistency checking. The
transformations are however very limited, as many aspects
of SBVR vocabularies are missing in the work, along with
behavioral rules. Some notable examples are the
categorization and segmentation parts of SBVR. The work makes some
strong assumptions for their mappings, for example
generating inverse verb property for all object properties, taking the
presence of `has' as property association. The assumptions
can result in generating incorrect ontologies. We opine that,
the work done by Kendall and Linehan is focused on a
particular directive, and thus the transformations are limited
for that utilization.
      </p>
      <p>
        Chittimalli and Anand[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] is the latest work to be done in
this eld. The authors take a di erent approach than the
existing preference towards OWL, and provide mappings to
SMT-LIBv2. They propose a domain independent method
of detecting inconsistencies in the business rules represented
using SBVR underlying logical foundations, along with 40
di erent mappings that are currently implemented, with
more expected to be provided in the future. Single sorted
logic have been used to support term concepts hierarchies
(specialization and synonyms), with primitive mappings
dened for handling noun concept, term concept, and name
concepts. Membership axioms have been de ned to
support these primitive mappings. They have used hierarchy
axioms to support specialization of term, noun, name
concepts and have mapped unary, binary, n-ary facts in SBVR
into SMT-LIBv2 function with appropriate number of
parameters. Their work support logical operators such as and,
or, not, if then else using logical mappings. The quanti
cation mappings are de ned using SMT-LIBv2 forall, exists
commands. The exactly-n, at least n, and at most n
(restricted quanti cation) has been supported predicates and
function calls. However they have not supported objecti
cation and nominalization. The query and answer
nominalization is generally used to nd the consistent rules in the
system. The complete work ow have been implemented in
the form of a prototype tool BuRRiTo which executes these
mappings.
      </p>
      <p>
        One mentionable work that works with automatic
consistency checking of business rules is the work done by
Solomakhin et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ]. The work was not included in our
review because the paper uses ORM2 representation instead
of SBVR. Nevertheless, since SBVR and ORM2 are quite
similar in their foundation and de nition, the latter being
more graphical oriented, we put in the summary of the
paper in this section. Their idea is to present a rst order
deontic-alethic logic representation of business rules with
sound and complete axiomatization which aims to capture
the complete semantics of and interaction between business
rules. A tool is proposed where ORM2 Formal Syntax is
translated to less expressible ALCQI, which is a fragment
of OWL2, and then checked for consistency. The approach
is to reduce the consistency check to a ALCQI satis ability,
which in turn can be termed as unsatis ability check in
resulting OWL2 ontologies. The introduction of First Order
Deontic and Alethic Logic (FODAL) has a strong
theoretical background, and the approach behind the tool is well
charted out. The aim is to map business rules to a usable
First Order Logic Format, rather than directly to ontologies,
providing users with the option of using the interactions
between the business rules. The use of ORM2 to represent
business rules is rather debatable, as the representation of
the business model will be open to interpretation. The use
of ALCQI causes the tool not to consider rules which are
deontic in nature. Since ALCQI has less expressive power
than ORM2, many concepts of SBVR are not considered
by the tool, such as, frequency constraints on multiple roles
and ring constraints (which deals with n-ary relations).
Major business rules set will have multiple cardinalities and
relationships which are subsets or exclusions of each other,
highlighting the above limitations.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS</title>
      <p>From the summary of each of the primary studies, we
highlight the major points, including the approach,
intention, implementation and drawbacks. The results are
presented in Table 2, where we classify each of the work
according to the properties for Study Quality Assessment presented
in Figure 1.</p>
      <p>
        In order to see which representation is preferred by the
majority we bucket the primary studies according to the
representation they are mapped to. It is clear that Web
Ontology Language OWL2 is the most preferred form of
knowledge representation, as OWL2 has capabilities for reasoning
and querying semantic speci cations. OWL2 also boasts of
a number of reasoners which aid in consistency checking, like
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16 ref18 ref4">4, 16, 18</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        OWL2 plays a very important role in knowledge
querying, with the help of ontology query language SPARQL
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ]. SBVR questions are formulated and transformed into
SPARQL for immediate access to business data from various
sources. In terms of consistency checking however, OWL2
has some drawbacks. Complete SBVR transformation has
not yet been done, the reason being that OWL2 is suitable
for knowledge representation, rather than assertion
enforcing. SBVR vocabulary with concepts and facts have direct
transformations to OWL2, being knowledge representation,
however SBVR rules, which are assertions to be enforced
have no direct mappings. That is the reason why in all
the mappings presented in the reviewed works, modality
of SBVR is not preserved in the transformations. Another
strong reason to discourage OWL2 is that Automatic Test
Case Generation is not possible when mapped to OWL2, as
no constraint checking is possible presently.
      </p>
      <p>
        The automation level for most of the works that we
reviewed are semi-automated. The work from [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref7 ref8 ref9">9, 7, 8, 10</xref>
        ] has
a prototype converter, which provides transformed
ontologies, in which the objects need to be de ned manually, for
consistency checking in any of the reasoners. The method in
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] involves manually changing the status of each rule in
order to nd the source of inconsistency or redundancy, which
is clearly not a judicious approach. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] has implemented
a framework, which is completely automated. The rest of
the methods present basic mappings without any tool or
transformation medium. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] is marked as semi-automatic
in Table 2 as the transformations are formal enough to be
automated.
      </p>
      <p>
        We nd the aim of most of the reviewed works as
representation of SBVR to a knowledge form, rather than any
de nite goal to be achieved with the knowledge form. To be
more de nite, most of the works do not aim for consistency
checking, rather they aim for representation in OWL2
ontology, which they claim can be used for consistency
checking, due to the presence of supported reasoners [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16 ref18 ref4">4, 16, 18</xref>
        ].
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ] and [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] are the works which aims for consistency or
redundancy checking, while [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ] publishes its performance for
consistency checking, but as mentioned earlier, the results
are not clear.
      </p>
      <p>
        Most of the reviewed works, make the use of running
examples, with the exception of [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref9">10, 9</xref>
        ] which uses a research
case study, Photo Equipment and [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] which uses EU Rent
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5</xref>
        ]. The lack of a proper case study is extremely startling,
and a major gap in this research area. The approach is
semi-formal in majority of the cases, with the trend being
to present a certain case followed by a transformation of
an example. No general representation is presented most of
the time, which makes it di cult for others to use the same
mappings for complex rules. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] aims to present a formal
approach, but as mentioned its coverage of SBVR aspects
is extremely limited. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] tries to remove this de ciency, by
presenting mappings based on general representation rather
than examples.
      </p>
      <p>
        The work from [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ], presents a tool, which automatically
identi es inconsistencies, and the sources behind the
inconsistencies. However, the coverage of the particular tool is
limited, and the debatable use of ORM2 instead of SBVR
is a drawback, as the representation becomes to open to
interpretation.
      </p>
      <p>So far, we have identi ed a few gaps in the solutions
proposed for our problem statement, which are listed below,
1. The mappings between SBVR rules and OWL2 are not
complete.
2. A stronger knowledge representation is needed, which
will be able to cover all aspects of SBVR for
inconsistency checks. Present ontologies are unable to provide
complete coverage.
3. Need for complete case studies, which covers all form
of inconsistencies and redundancies.
4. There is a lack of automation in the work ow.</p>
      <p>Future research should be directed at closing the above
mentioned gaps. If OWL2 is the decided knowledge base
for SBVR representation, then the strength and coverage of
the former needs to be increased. A complete list of
possible inconsistencies and redundancies that can exist in SBVR
needs to be veri ed and published. If ontologies fall short
for the above requirements, other knowledge representation
forms needs to be explored with a merger between di
erent knowledge representations becoming a major possibility.
The need of the hour is a complete case study which covers
all the complexities that exist in this research problem. The
presence of a case study, which has all the possible
inconsistencies, will make it possible for a tool to be declared a
complete inconsistency checker for business rules. The selection
of knowledge representation should also consider the idea of
automation, which means that the rules that causes
inconsistencies or redundancies, should automatically be identi ed,
without any manual e ort from the user's side.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>CONCLUSION</title>
      <p>We observed that much of the prior work for consistency
checking of SBVR business rules is directed towards
converting SBVR to OWL2, aiming to exploit the querying
capability available for OWL2 representation. Due to limitations of
OWL2 reasoners to enforce assertions and check constraints,
exploiting the OWL2 reasoners is not the primary objective
of the conversions. Unfortunately, the mappings from SBVR
to OWL2 are not complete, primarily due to few constructs
of SBVR that have no direct equivalents in OWL2. Due
to the absence of speci c purpose-driven transformations of
SBVR to OWL2, there are multiple mappings, leading to
only semi-automated transformations.</p>
      <p>We see the need to e ectively extend OWL2 to enhance
its strength and coverage. A benchmark to establish a
common minimum set of anomalies for SBVR will go a long
way for making it an e ective representation, or evolving
another useful representation. Suitability of knowledge
representation for querying and automated checking for
anomalies needs to be primary criteria for selecting and evolving
standards.</p>
    </sec>
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