Overview: A data model for rule authoring

You use a vocabulary to write rules. You define the vocabulary in the business object model (BOM).

The vocabulary defines what policy managers can write business rules about. The elements of the vocabulary are defined in a Business Object Model (BOM).

You can define the BOM from scratch or create it from an Execution Object Model (XOM) that references compiled Java™ classes and other data sources. You can extend the BOM without modifying the XOM. The XOM describes quite extensively the elements that you need for rule editing

Overview of business object model and Execution Object Model

You can define a BOM in one of two ways:

  • Bottom-up: In this case, you create a BOM entry from the XOM. If you find that you require additional elements in the BOM to facilitate rule editing for policy managers, you can extend the BOM by creating business elements and mapping them to the XOM.

  • Top-down: In this case you create business elements without necessarily considering the way that the execution elements are going to be implemented. At a later date, when you implement the execution elements, you can specify a mapping for all your business elements.

The rule project contains:

  • Business rules, which express a business policy. Business rules have a list of conditions to meet before doing a list of actions. You write business rules by using the Business Action Language (BAL).

  • Technical rules, which comprise a condition part and an action part. The condition part binds variables to objects and attribute values and specifies tests on attribute values. The action part specifies the actions to be carried out if the rule is run. You write technical rules in Rule Designer.