A Markup Language for ORM Business Rules

Conceptual modeling techniques such as EER, ORM and to some extent the UML have been developed in the past for building information systems. These techniques or suitable extensions can often also be used to design business rules at a conceptual level. In particular in this paper we adopt the well-known CM technique of ORM, which has a rich complement of business rule specification, and develop ORM-ML, an XML-based markup language for ORM. Clearly domain modeling of this kind will be closely related to work on so-called ontologies and we will briefly discuss the analogies and differences. Since ORM schemas are typically saved as graphical files, we designed a textual representation as a marked-up document in ORM-ML so we can save these ORM schemas in a more machine exchangeable way over the Internet. Moreover, we can now write style sheets to convert such schemas into another syntax, e.g. pseudo natural language, first order logic, a given rule engine’s language, etc. We give (in appendix) a complete formal definition ("grammar") of ORM-ML as an XML Schema, a comprehensive description of all of ORM's business rules in ORM-ML syntax and present an algorithm to map ORM schema's into ORM-ML. We illustrate the concept on a number of examples.