Expressing and organising business rules

Business rules represent projections of organisations' constraints and ways of working on their supporting information systems. Therefore, their collection, expression, structuring and organisation should be central activities within information systems analysis. The work presented in this paper concerns the definition of a repository schema for managing business rules, taking into account the objectives (a) to facilitate the rule collection process, (b) to assist the transition from analysis to design and implementation of the information system, and (c) to support business change once the new system has been delivered. These objectives are achieved through the enhancement of the rule repository schema with information on the logistics of the collection process and references to underlying enterprise informational and behavioural knowledge models. The proposed schema and way of working are demonstrated through a number of examples, which are derived from an industrial project concerning electronic procurement in the construction sector. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.