Bridging Ontology and Implementation with a New DEMO Action Meta-model and Engine

We consider current Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) Action Rules Specification to be unnecessarily complex and ambiguous. Even while using a “structured English” syntax similar to the one used in SBVR, such specifications are: incomplete while not containing enough ontological information to derive a functional implementation; and complex by containing mostly unneeded specifications. We propose a new meta-model for DEMO’s Action Model in the form of an EBNF syntax which is being implemented in a prototype that directly executes DEMO models as an Information and Workflow System. This prototype includes an action engine that runs DEMO transactions and the enclosed actions specified in our approach. We are currently integrating Blockly in our solution to allow syntactically correct visual programming of our proposed new Action Rule language that includes constructs to evaluate logical conditions, update the state of internal or external information systems, obtain input and provide output (formatted with WYSIWYG template editor) to users, among others.