Ontology, Rule and DSL-based Software Re-engineering: a Case Study

uebe.Q is a managing software for solid referential information systems, such as ISO 9000 (for quality) and ISO 1400 (for environment). This is a long-term developed software, encompassing extensive and solid business logic with a long and successful record of deployments. A recent business model change imposed that the evolution and configuration of the software, shifts from the company (and especially the development team) to consultants and other business partners. The so far acceptable rigidity, fragility, immobility and opacity of the software became a problem. This paper describes the approach adopted in re-engineering the software by using (i) ontologies for the specification of business concepts, (ii) closed-world assumption (CWA) rules for the specification of the dynamics of the system and (iii) DSL for the configuration of the system by domain/business experts.