Summary

The business rules movement is a significant step forward in building and maintaining business applications. Business rules and semantics go hand in hand. Business rules are much more powerful when they are built on a solid semantic foundation, and the business rules themselves form a semantic ontology of what it is possible to express in these nonprocedural forms.

This chapter has covered the following key issues:

• Applications built with current technology are expensive to build and maintain.

• Their complexity makes it difficult to change the system as the environment changes.

• Some of that complexity is in the rules that express the logic of the application, although they are buried in a great deal of code that procedurally determines when those rules can fire.

• The business rules approach is a major breakthrough in flexibility and expressiveness of application logic.

• Basing business rules on semantic-based ontologies, and concentrating on expressing rules at the highest level of those ontologies, will yield a great reduction in complexity of the rule base.

In summary, this approach will make it possible to change the nature of applications, making them more responsive to end users and analysts.

The next several chapters take the idea of semantic-based rules and examine the following questions:

• Since we application builders define the applications, how do we elicit or discover the semantics on which the rules will be implemented?

• Since everything beyond the most trivial application involves more than one person, how do we go about communicating a potentially complex semantic model to others?