An Approach and Software Prototype for Translation of Natural Language Business Rules into Database Structure

Abstract

In the recent decades data has indeed become one of the most valuable assets for government institutions, private businesses, and individual persons. Nowadays almost any software, from social networks and dating mobile applications to large information systems and analytical services for enterprise management, accumulates, stores, and processes data to solve certain problems in their subject areas. Extremely large data volumes are organized in databases that are used as the baseline for almost all of modern software applications. As the most important components of software systems, databases should be carefully designed, since drawbacks at the stage of requirements elicitation may result in exponential growth of defects fixing costs at testing and maintenance phases. Therefore, this study proposes an approach and software tool to database schema generation from textual requirements also known in database design domain as business rules. This may help database designers to rapidly obtain usable database schemas in order to detect and fix defects as early as possible. Moreover, proposed solution may simplify the database design process, since database creation scripts are generated from business rules directly. Thus, instead of coding all the required statements, engineers are only need to check obtained schema and make certain adjustments to data types, unique attributes, or used naming style. This research considers relational model and relational databases, since they are most widely used nowadays. State-of-the-art analysis is made, proposed approach is described in details, software tool with its brief usage examples is described, conclusions are made, and further research directions are formulated.