IDIOM News
From Business Rules Journal
Preparing the IDIOM Decision Suite Business Rules Repository
A technically inclined administrator prepares the repository by loading the schemas and performing other administrative tasks, such as defining users and workgroups. Before being presented to the rules builders schemas undergo some simplification and customization. IDIOM renders XML schemas to remove unnecessary complexity and to allow the user to deal with a normalised and familiar view of the world. All includes, complex types, and other sophisticated schema modifiers are resolved, and a normalised tree structure is produced in which elements and attributes are presented simply as nodes. An IDIOM rendered schema is a simple structure having a single root and a fully expanded tree of nodes, which can be presented to the user in an intuitively clear and simple hierarchical format.
Figure 2: A schema in IDIOM
In some cases a degree of complexity may still be present, for example when the organisation chooses to build its applications on large industry-standard schemas such as MDDL (Market Data Definition Language) that can have millions of nodes in their IDIOM rendered form. To further reduce this complexity IDIOM provides an opportunity for the administrator to filter the raw schema down to a selected set of nodes, so that the rules builders see only those sections of the domain that are truly relevant for them. This comfort zone can also be extended by renaming nodes with aliases, so that local terminology can be used if preferred.
Defining Decisions and Formulas
Once the XML schemas are set up the rule builders can begin working with the IDIOM Decision Manager.
- Output nodes in the schemas are identified. Each of these is the site of an atomic decision where a result of interest is stored at runtime in the decision request described by the schema. Rule builders assign descriptive names to decisions (such as Set Base Premium), arrange them in processing sequence (an example is given later), and later link them to the formulas that calculate their results.
- Each decision needs at least one formula to calculate its value. Formulas are trees of operations and arguments which operate on input values in the decision request. They are developed in IDIOM using graphical tools and validated and tested using the integrated Test Executive.
- Tested formulas can be output in a logical English form for verification by business experts.
These tasks are typically performed by a domain expert, often with the support of a business analyst. The domain expert specifies the intent of the business rules in any convenient form, which may range from informal (even oral) business language to a formal specification document.
The business analyst then uses IDIOM to express the rules in a precise and structured form. With the help of IDIOM’s inbuilt validation and testing facilities, the formula logic is progressively clarified and gaps are identified and closed in consultation with the domain expert. Finally, IDIOM produces the formulas in near-natural language for the domain expert to verify.
Figure 3: The Systems Development Life Cycle using IDIOM
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