SBVR vs OCL: A Comparative Analysis of Standards

TL;DR

This paper compares SBVR and OCL standards, analyzing their features, similarities, and differences to explore potential for automatic transformation between business and software constraints.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparative analysis of SBVR and OCL, highlighting their key features and identifying parameters for possible integration or transformation.

Findings

Identified similarities between SBVR and OCL standards.

Highlighted differences and key parameters for integration.

Explored mechanisms for automatic transformation from SBVR to OCL.

Abstract

In software modelling, the designers have to produce UML visual models with software constraints. Similarly, in business modelling, designers have to model business processes using business constraints (business rules). Constraints are the key components in the skeleton of business or software models. A designer has to write constraints to semantically compliment business models or UML models and finally implementing the constraints into business processes or source code. Business constraints/rules can be written using SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules) while OCL (Object Constraint Language) is the well-known medium for writing software constraints. SBVR and OCL are two significant standards from OMG. Both standards are principally different as SBVR is typically used in business domains and OCL is employed to compliment software models. However, we have identified a few similarities in both standards that are interesting to study. In this paper, we have performed a comparative analysis of both standards as we are looking for a mechanism for automatic transformation of SBVR to OCL. The major emphasis of the study is to highlight principal features of SBVR and OCL such as similarities, differences and key parameters on which these both standards can work together.