Bridging concrete and abstract syntax of Web rule languages

Abstract

This paper proposes a solution for bridging abstract and concrete syntax of a Web rule language by using model transformations. Current specifications of Web rule languages such as Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) define its abstract syntax (e.g., EBNF notation) and concrete syntax (e.g., XML schema) separately. Although the recent research in the area of Model-Driven Engineering demonstrates that such a separation of two types of syntax is a good practice (due to the complexity of languages), one should also have tools that check validity of rules written in a concrete syntax with respect to the abstract syntax of the rule language. In this study, we use analyze the REWERSE I1 Rule Markup Language (R2ML) whose abstract syntax is defined by using metamodeling, while its textual concrete syntax is defined by using XML schema. We bridge this gap by a bi-directional transformation defined in a model transformation language (i.e., ATL).