A grammar of business rules in Information Systems

Abstract

There are many situations during information system development (ISD) where there is a need to do modelling on a business level before more detailed and robust modelling are done on the technical system level. Most business level modelling uses some form of natural language constructs which are, on the one hand, easy to use by untrained users, but which are too vague and ambiguous to be used in subsequent systems level modelling by systems analysts, on the other hand. The goal of this article is to suggest a subset of morphology, syntax and semantics concepts that may be used to analyse texts containing business rules during Information Systems analysis and design. The contribution of this research is to provide a better understanding of the fundamental entities in business and ISD modelling and their relationships in order to improve informal, mostly textual, business modelling.

Keywords: business rules, modelling, grammar, morphology, syntax, semantics

Disciplines: Information Systems, Information Systems Development, Information Systems Analysis and Design, Linguistics