Business Rules for Business Governance

To reduce the gap between the business-oriented view of business rules of business people and the technical orientation of technical people, we introduce a Business layer on top of the CIM layer of MDA. This facilitates an investigation into the features of business-oriented business rules. We underpin our work with a four dimensional framework of business rules consisting of the domain, system, representation, and application dimensions. Since our focus is on features of business rules, our interest is the domain dimension. This dimension provides a number of attributes of business rules but we concentrate on the governance/guidance attribute to develop the features needed for capturing this attribute in business rules. We express governance concepts in three levels. The Governance model is the top most level and consists of governance objects, governance criteria, and the governance relationship between these. We obtain BIGm by instantiating the Governance model based on concepts of the Business Motivation Model. Finally, BIGm is instantiated to yield BOGm. We illustrate our business rules with examples from the library management domain.