=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-549/paper-2
|storemode=property
|title=K-Site Rules at the RuleML Challenge 2009
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-549/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-549
|authors=José L. Martínez-Fernández,José C. González-Cristóbal and Paloma Martínez
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ruleml/Martinez-FernandezCM09
}}
==K-Site Rules at the RuleML Challenge 2009==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-549/paper2.pdf
K-Site Rules at the RuleML Challenge 2009
José L. Martínez-Fernández1,2, José C. González-Cristóbal2,3,Paloma Martínez2
1
DAEDALUS – Data, Decisions and Language S.A.
Avda. de la Albufera, 321
28031 Madrid, Spain
{jmartinez, jgonzalez}@daedalus.es
2
Advanced Databases Group, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Avda. de la Universidad, 30
28911 Leganés, Spain
{joseluis.martinez, paloma.martinez}@uc3m.es
3
DIT, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Avda. Complutense, 30
28040 Madrid, Spain
josecarlos.gonzalez@upm.es
Abstract. There exist a great number of business rules engines in the market,
each one with its own rules language. As a result, the need of a standard rules
definition language is obvious. In this demo paper, the application of a
combination of standard business rules languages to develop a business rules
management tool, K-Site Rules, is explained. The main goals of this tool are:
first, to integrate the development process for business rules in the software
development lifecycle and, second, to make this development independent of
rule engine products. K-Site Rules does not include its own rule engine
implementation but acts as a broker to the preferred rule engine. In this way,
business rules can be reused across different rule engines (which can change
because of economical issues, performance issues, etc.) and through different
projects in the company. The K-Site Rules tool is part of ITECBAN, a project
devoted to the definition of a new platform core for banking applications.
Keywords: Business Rules Management System, RIF, OWL, Model Driven
Architecture
1 Introduction
In the last few years, companies have started to introduce business rules systems
(BRS) as one of the components of their information systems. The ability to adapt
business processes to changes in the environment with low development costs is the
main reason to introduce this knowledge based systems in the company’s IT
infrastructures. If business rules are properly identified, business behavior can be
modified without applications recoding.
2 José L. Martínez-Fernández, Paloma Martínez, José C. González-Cristóbal
According to the Business Rules Group1 (BRG), a business rule can be defined as
“a directive, intended to influence or guide business behavior, in support of business
policy that has been formulated in response to an opportunity, threat, strength, or
weakness”. From the Information Technology (IT) point of view a business rule can
be defined as “a statement that defines or constrains an aspect of the business. It is
intended to assert business structure, or to control or influence the behavior of the
business”. This work is centered on the latter definition.
There are several main drawbacks in the integration of BRSs in the IT
infrastructure of the company: first of all, it is not clear how to engage the software
development cycle with the business rules approach since business rules are usually
scattered in the application code. Second, there are a lot of commercial products
implementing business rules but there is no common way to express business rules;
this lack of widespread standards is a main issue in the business rules field.
Currently, there is a trend in software development based on the Model Driven
Architecture (MDA) [3] where the main goals are promoting interoperability,
portability and usability. For this purpose, several steps are taken: obtaining a system
specification independent of the platform supporting it, identifying possible platforms,
choosing a platform and transforming the generic model into the platform specific
model. The right place in this architecture for BRSs must be envisaged to assure a
good integration with the rest of technologies used by current IT systems. In this way,
current drawbacks could be overcome. So, MDA assumes independence from the
business rule engine to be used to implement the system. For this purpose, it can be
assured that the principles of the Semantic Web can be applied, from the Ontology
Web Language (OWL) [6] standard to the Rules Interchange Format (RIF) [7]. So,
the ability to formalize the domain upon which business rules are defined through the
use of ontologies can constitute an improvement for business rule systems.
This demo paper describes a prototype of K-Site Rules, the tool for business rule
development that is being developed in the ITECBAN project (Architecture for Core
Banking Information Systems), funded by the Spanish Center for the Development of
Industrial Technology (CDTI, Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade), INGENIO
2010 Program.
2 K-Site Rules Framework Description
K-Site Rules is the name given to the tool developed by DAEDALUS and INDRA as
part of the ITECBAN project. K-Site Rules is a tool specifically designed to support
the business rules development process when rule engines are considered as part of
the architecture of an IT system. Two main objectives have guided the development
of K-Site Rules: first, independence of the rule engine selected to implement business
rules, that is, the definition of the rule must be independent of the rule engine where it
is going to be executed. This situation is depicted in Figure 1.
1 http://www.businessrulesgroup.org
K-Site Rules at the RuleML Challenge 2009 3
Secondly, an easy and simple integration in the software development cycle
adopted in the target organization must be provided. For this reason, K-Site Rules
developer editor is integrated in the ECLIPSE development environment2.
Figure 2 shows the software components of K-Site Rules, where three basic
elements can be distinguished.
BUSINESS CONCEPTS
Client Office Product Entity
K-SITE RULES
Configuration
Configuration Rules Engine Rules Engine Rules Engine
Manager
Manager (JBoss Rules) (ILOG Rules)
(Fair Isaac)
Figure 1. K-Site Rules as an intermediary framework
Development Phase
Execution
Phase
Figure 2. K-Site Rules software components architecture
Rule Editors
K-Site Rules has been developed taking into account three different user roles:
business analysts (also called domain experts), developers and tool administrators.
2 http://www.eclipse.org
4 José L. Martínez-Fernández, Paloma Martínez, José C. González-Cristóbal
Business analysts are people with knowledge about the business but no technical
capabilities, only as office software users. These people need tools with very simple
user interfaces for them to be able to put their knowledge about the business in the
form of business rules that can be processed by information systems. This is the main
goal of the K-Site Rules Expert editor, allowing the definition of business rules using
natural language, decision tables or decision trees in a web based interface. This
module produces a standard definition of the business rules, currently using the RIF
format which is stored in the configuration manager module. This web module also
includes features to validate the defined business rules by providing test values and
expected results when the rule is applied.
Developers, on the other hand, have a deep technical knowledge, but they are less
aware about business domain concepts. For them there is also a particular tool,
allowing the design, implementation and testing of business rules. This tool is
integrated in the development environment, an Eclipse based development
environment in the first implementation of K-Site Rules. As the K-Site Rules Expert
editor does, the Developer Editor generates a standard expression of the business rule
using RIF. This standard version is stored in the configuration Manager Module and
is shared with business analysts. The developer has the ability to select the rule engine
that will be used to execute the business rule, and to produce an automatic translation
to the specific language of the selected rule engine. This module also provides the
ability to validate business rules by giving test data and desired results.
Table 1 shows the technology environment selected for the implementation of both
rule editors.
Table 1. Development technologies used in K-Site editors
Technical Feature K-Site Rules Expert Development Editor
Editor
Base tool Browser based Eclipse based
Development technology Tomcat 6 + Google Web JAVA Programming
Toolkit Language
Installation None Eclipse + Plugin
requirements configuration
There is a component in charge of transforming Unified Modeling Language
(UML) models to OWL ones, which are then graphically depicted in order to
facilitate users understanding of the knowledge model. The steps for the
transformation among models are taken from the Ontology Definition Metamodel
(ODM) [4] specification. This transformation is implemented using JAVA
programming language and a library to deal with OWL structures, OWLApi [2]
K-Site Rules at the RuleML Challenge 2009 5
Rules Translator
This is the core component of K-Site Rules and it is in charge of obtaining rule
expressions according to a specific rule engine. The input to this module is a standard
expression of the business rule, currently based on the RIF language. The output is a
representation of the same business rule in the specific language understood by the
rule engine. For example, if the rule engine selected to implement rules is ILOG
JRules, the RIF representation must be translated to IRL, the rule language supported
by ILOG JRules. If K-Site Rules is going to be included in a development process
based on a Model Driven Architecture, this component is crucial to allow an
automatic generation of an implementation of a system from the models defining that
system.
There are different translation steps in the process. The first one is from RIF format
to OMG Production Rules Representation (OMG PRR) [5] and the second one from
OMG PRR to the proprietary language used in the rule engine that is supporting the
Business Rules Management System. The RIF to OMG PRR translation is done
following the operators defined at the RIF Production Rules Dialect (RIF PRD)
standard. A specific software component has been implemented in K-Site Rules to
perform this transformation.
Configuration Manager
The Configuration Manager Module is a repository where business rules, probably
with different versions, are stored. The current implementation of this module is
based on Subversion, SVN [1], which provides needed version control and team work
capabilities. In fact, developer and business analyst tools communicate through this
component; changes made by one role to a business rule are shared with the other role
through the configuration manager module. This component also allows auditing of
business rules under development.
3 Software development cycle integration
K-Site Rules considers business rules at every stage of the development process. At
the analysis phase, K-Site Rules provides tools to allow business experts the
definition of business rules using natural language expressions and their vocabulary.
Business analysts even have the tools to test the functionality of the business rules
they are working in. At design time, developers can review, test and validate business
rules in the specific rule language (IRL, DRL, etc.) built by the tool, by accessing the
business rules expressions stored in the configuration management system. If it is
needed they can develop additional business rules or adapt obtained implementations.
Regarding business rules deployment, K-Site Rules does not impose any restriction,
business rules produced by the tool reside at the configuration management system
and can be deployed according to deployment policies defined at the company.
6 José L. Martínez-Fernández, Paloma Martínez, José C. González-Cristóbal
4 Example
This section summarizes the business rules development process using K-Site Rules
expert editor. Suppose a car insurance company where conditions to give a policy to a
customer can be expressed using rules. This is the domain model defined for the
example environment shown at the test web site (please, follow section 5 instructions
to access), at the Business Model tab. Figure 3 depicts the diagram for the insurance
company model.
Figure 3. Business model shown by K-Site Rules expert editor
Three main concepts are used in the example, the policy holder (Policy_Holder),
who is the customer contracting the policy, the car involved in the policy (Car) and
the policy itself (Policy).
Suppose that you want to define the following business rule to state the fee that a
customer must pay for an insurance:
If the customer is between 30 and 55 years old and the rated horse power of the car to
include in the policy is over 120 HP then the fee to pay is 500$. In any other case, the
fee will be 400$
This business rule will be part of a decision service devoted to the definition of the
fee that each customer must pay. The input for the decision service is formed by three
concepts: the policy to be contracted (a Policy), data for the holder of that policy (a
Policy Holder), and data of the car involved in the policy (Car). It is possible to define
the given business rule as a written rule using the corresponding tool provided by K-
Site Rules expert editor, once a ruleset has been defined. The written rule obtained is
depicted in Figure 4.
K-Site Rules at the RuleML Challenge 2009 7
Figure 4. Written business rules definition with K-Site Rules expert editor
Once the rule is defined, a validation process can be done through the functionality
included in the Validation tab. At this tab, some example data can be given for
instances of the concepts appearing as the input of the decision service.
Of course, validation data can be loaded through Excel files and, for developers,
there is also the possibility of using serialized objects.
5 Conclusions
This demo paper is supported by the presentation available at
http://clients.daedalus.es/MK-2009-43-ITECBAN-01.pdf. This presentation includes
a guided tour through the different editors, describing the steps to be given in order to
develop a business rule. There is also the possibility of testing K-Site Rules Expert
tool, using as credentials: 'ruleml' as the user and 'ruleml09' as the password, through
the following URL: http://163.117.129.57:8080/KSiteRulesExperto/?locale=en On
the other hand, the development tool must be installed on a local machine so no web
access can be provided but local demos can be performed if required.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper has been partially supported by the Spanish Center for the Development of
Industrial Technology (CDTI, Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade), through the
project ITECBAN (Architecture for Core Banking Information Systems), INGENIO
2010 Programme. Other partners in ITECBAN are INDRA Sistemas, CajaMadrid,
8 José L. Martínez-Fernández, Paloma Martínez, José C. González-Cristóbal
Sun Microsystems and Grid Systems. Special mention to our colleagues at INDRA
must be done for their involvement in the specification of K-Site Rules: Fernando
Alcántara, Pablo Leal, Juan Carlos Macho and Gonzalo Pando (in alphabetical order).
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