A Model-Driven Perspective on the Rule-Based Specification of Services

The focus in this position paper is on business rules as a means to raise the level of abstraction (and automation) at which business logic is incorporated in model driven application design in the context of service oriented architectures. More specifically, next to providing a classification framework for business rules and investigating the existing standards and languages for the formal specification of business rules, we propose a model-driven framework for the rule-based design of services. We provide an example to illustrate this framework and to demonstrate the role business rules can play in the context of MDD of SOAs. Furthermore, we also explore, in terms of existing tool support, the extent to which, the model-driven design process can be complemented and combined with business rules written in nearly natural language, which can become, at the platform specific level, an executable way to specify business knowledge and decisions.