Extracting SBVR business vocabularies and business rules from UML use case diagrams

In model-driven information systems engineering, model transformations reside at the very core of this paradigm. Indeed, model transformations (in particular, model-to-model, or M2M) are a must-have feature of any modern model-driven approach supported by CASE technology. Model transformations are intended to raise quality of the models under development, and also speed-up the modeling itself by bringing in certain level of automation into the development process. Nevertheless, due to certain objective reasons, the level of such automation is spread unevenly throughout the development process - in this respect, Business Modeling and System Analysis are, arguably, the most underdeveloped phases of the model-driven information systems development life cycle. In this paper, we show how M2M transformation technology was used to extract well-structured business vocabularies and business rules from formal use case models represented through a set of use case diagrams; Object Management Group's (OMG) standards Semantics for Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) and Unified Modeling Language (UML) were used for this purpose. The proposed solution consists of two concurrent approaches, namely, automatic and semi-automatic, which may be used selectively to achieve the best expected result. Basic implementation aspects of the solution integrating both approaches are also briefly presented in the paper. While UML use case models is the main subject in this research, the proposed solution may be adopted for other UML and MOF-based models as well.