Developing an SBVR grammar with content assist support for validation of business rules

Sammanfattning: This report describes the process of developing a dynamic grammar for validation of business rules that follow the SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules) standard. The SBVR rules provide a high-level approach to structure the logic of a business or organisation. The product of this thesis is a grammar module that handles the validation and content assist of SBVR rules, as part of a business rule management system. The method used for developing the grammar was to study the structure of a set of example SBVR rules supplied at project start. The grammar module was written in Java, while the grammar itself was defined in EBNF (Extended Backus-Naur Form) using the parser generator tool ANTLR. The main objectives of the grammar module are to validate SBVR business rules, provide content assist for users writing SBVR rules, supply the functionality to update parts of the defined grammar at runtime, and locate and extract verb concepts from the SBVR rules in order for them to be validated by other modules in the rule management system. Performance and accuracy measurements were made which shows that the resulting grammar module can in a timely manner correctly validate more than 90 %, and locate and extract the correct verb concepts of more than 85 % of the tested SBVR rules.