Extending CDIF to support Business Rules targeting SQL3

Abstract: Business Rules have gained attention in recent years and are now considered to be important organizational elements. Several sources in the literature argue that there are major achievements to be made with an explicit business rule focus in software engineering, e.g. promoting communication between analysts and users and accounting for changeability and maintenance aspects. However, to fully take advantage of an explicit rule focus in software engineering requires the ability to create business rule models. The problem is that business rule models of realistic size quickly become extensive and complex, hence there is a need for CASE tool support. We choose a modeling technique from the literature which is suited to express business rules. Basec on this modeling technique we propose an extension to the Case Data Interchange Format standard (CDIF), thereby allowing the standard to express and support the transfer of business rule models. In addition, we define a mapping procedure that which maps business rules from the conceptual modeling level via CDIF (using the proposed extensions) to SQL3 triggers. The main idea is that the mapping algorithms could be used by a CDIF conformant CASE tool which allows traditional database design, together with extended modeling constructs for expressign business rules.