Gender

Some languages have grammatical gender that can apply to the concepts and attributes in a business model definition. You can specify it by using the gender keyword. The rules that refer to these concepts and attributes are then grammatically correct and easier to read.

The gender keyword has the following values: masculine, feminine, neuter. The value is used to adapt the verbalization of the term that you write in the rules.

You specify the gender of a term only once in the business model definition.

To specify the gender of a term, use the following syntax:

[gender : <value>]

To specify the plural and the gender of a term, you use the following syntax:

[plural : <value>, gender : <value>]

English is a gender-neutral language. It does, however, use certain nouns and pronouns (such as "he" and "she") to refer specifically to a person or an animal by its sex, and certain others (such as "it") for sexless objects. For example, you might use the gender keyword to identify the gender of a person:

a father is a business entity [ gender : masculine ] identified by a person ID.

In many other languages, gender is an inherent quality of nouns, and it affects the forms of other related words. For example, the noun "car" in French is "voiture" and is feminine. If you specify its gender in the business model file, the verbalization uses the corresponding feminine articles in your rules.