Natural Language Specification and Violation Reporting of Business Rules over ER-modeled Databases

This paper presents our work on adapting and extending natural language interface (NLI) to database technology to support the specification and violation reporting of business rules. The resulting system allows non-technical users to author and manage a rulebook in controlled natural language - serving as a single point of definition that can be compiled into SQL to generate violation reports. To achieve this we represent business rules in tuple calculus, handle negation in our query re-writing algorithms and add support for natural language reflexives (e.g. 'its', 'themselves', etc.). Our results show a large class of business rules can be captured with these extensions. Although our approach is general, we present it applied to compliance checking of regulations over a materiel capability development information system at the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration. At EDBT we will also demonstrate this work over a more generic package delivery domain. While there has been recent effort in pursuing Semantics for Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) in the semantic web and description logic communities, to our knowledge ours is the first attempt to provide this capability for ER-modeled relational databases