OABIS: An Ontology-Based Approach to Business Rules Sourcing in Supply Chain Management Systems

Abstract

In recent years, business-rule management has become an important component of enterprise information systems. Business rules are guidelines for how an enterprise should conduct its business and provide better service to customers. Business rules are being widely deployed in supply chains to support real-time decision-making. The research reported in this chapter is aimed at designing a dynamically adaptable data-sourcing service for deploying business rules effectively in supply-chain management. Such a data sourcing service is important since execution of business rules requires data to be retrieved from various data sources spread across the enterprise, including the enterprise data warehouse. We propose an ontology-based approach to implement the data-sourcing service for business rules. Our approach captures semantics of business rules and provides an agent-enabled mechanism that dynamically maps business rules to individual database schemas in the supply chain.