A graphical editor for the conceptual design of business rules

At the conceptual level, business rules are formulated from an external observation perspective according to the event-condition-action structure of rules in active database systems. Situation/activation diagrams homogeneously extend object/behavior diagrams to a graphical notation for the conceptual design of business objects and their associated business rules. Situation diagrams provide a high-level representation of logical events. Activation diagrams specify graphically which activities have to be performed upon some triggering event if an associated condition is satisfied. The developed editor supports both object/behavior diagrams and situation/activation diagrams. The editor performs syntactic consistency checks during the interactive design process. Moreover, by building the logical model in parallel with the diagrams, the editor guarantees that local semantic consistency checks can be performed incrementally, too. The editor clearly separates between schema data and pure visualization data describing the location of diagram elements. This separation facilitates the reuse of the generated data for further processing. Both schema data and visualization data are stored in the commercial object-oriented database system GemStone. Alternatively, those data may be stored in a file. The editor has been implemented using VisualWorks and MetaDoME, a framework for building graphical editors with VisualWorks.