COMPARISON BETWEEN THE BUSINESS MODELLING

METHODS PROVIDED BY MEASUR AND RUP

Hui Du, Tingting Li and Dan Ding

Beijing Philosophy and Social Science Research Center for Beijing Transportation Development

School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China

Keywords: Information Systems, Business Modelling, MEASUR, RUP.

Abstract: Business modelling is a primary task in information systems development lifecycle. Although both

MEASUR (Methods for Eliciting, Analyzing and Specifying User’s Requirement) and RUP (Rational

Unified Process) provide their own Business Modelling Method (BMM), each has obvious merits and

drawbacks. In order to devise a combined BMM, which can keep the merits and avoid the drawbacks at the

same time, in this paper, comparison between the two BMMs respectively from semantics, pragmatics and

social world of the semiotic framework is specified. The method to extend UML activity diagrams with the

deontic operators “permitted”, “prohibited” and “obliged” is proposed.

1 INTRODUCTION

It has been widely accepted by current Information

Systems (IS) researchers that IS are social-

technological systems. That is to say, to develop a

successful information system, first of all,

developers have to fully understand the business in

which the information system works. Therefore,

business modelling has been a primary task in IS

development lifecycle.

As two kinds of IS development methods,

although both MEASUR (Methods for Eliciting,

Analyzing and Specifying User’s Requirement) and

RUP (Rational Unified Process) provide their own

Business Modelling Method (BMM), each has

obvious merits and drawbacks. To keep the merits

and avoid the drawbacks at the same time, there are

researchers who have correlated the two BMMs. In

(Xie, Liu and Emmitt, 2003), it was pointed out that

Ontological Dependencies (OD) in Ontology Charts

(OC) can be modelled as either nested classes or

inheritances in UML Class Diagrams (CD).

Moreover, gathering the agents’ potential actions on

a particular business term and then analyzing and

recording the agents’ norms for each of the actions

in UML Activity Diagrams (AD). In (Bonacin,

Baranauskas and Liu, 2004) and (Ades, Poernomo

and Tsaramirsis, 2007), continuing the effort in (Xie,

Liu and Emmitt, 2003), rules are provided to transfer

OC into UML CD respectively. However, until now,

there’s no research comparing the two BMMs from

semantics, pragmatics and social world of the

semiotic framework respectively and proposing a

method to extend UML AD with the deontic

operators “permitted”, “prohibited” and “obliged”.

This paper is organized as follows: in section 2,

both the semiotic framework and the two BMMs are

introduced. In section 3, the comparison between the

two BMMs is specified. In section 4, the method to

extend UML AD with the deontic operators is

proposed. Finally, in section 5, conclusions are

provieded.

2 THEORETICAL

AND METHODOLOGICAL

BACKGROUND

2.1 The Semiotic Framework

Traditionally, the division of semiotics has been

syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. Stamper has

added the other three, which are physical world,

empirics and social world, and proposed the

semiotic framework illustrated in figure 1 (Liu,

2000).

432

Du H., Li T. and Ding D..

COMPARISON BETWEEN THE BUSINESS MODELLING METHODS PROVIDED BY MEASUR AND RUP.

DOI: 10.5220/0003586304320438

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (EIT-2011), pages 432-438

ISBN: 978-989-8425-55-3

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)



Figure 1: The semiotic framework.

Figure 2: One of the OC for a project management.

2.1.1 Semantics

Semantics is commonly considered as the study of

interpretation of signs as used by agents within

particular circumstances and contexts. People use

signs in the communication to understand each other.

2.1.2 Pragmatics

When a sign has a meaning, it can be used

intentionally for certain purposes in communications.

Pragmatics, in such a case of the purposeful use of

signs, is a branch of semiotics concerned with the

relationships between signs and the behaviors of

agents.



2.1.3 Social World

When a conversation takes place between two or

more people, a change at social level will be caused.

A conversation can be seen as a proper chain of

speech acts. As soon as a speech act is addressed to

the addressee, an obligation is usually built up for

the addressee. In a social setting, norms govern

people’s behaviours.

2.2 The BMM Provided by MEASUR

Proposed in the later 1970s, MEASUR is a radically

set of semiotics based methods for business

modelling and requirements specification for IS

development. To complete business modelling,

MEASUR provides two major methods: Semantic

Analysis Method (SAM) and Norm Analysis Method

(NAM) (Liu, 2000).

Using SAM, required functions of an envisaged

information system will be specified in OC, which

describe an acceptable view of responsible agents in

a business domain. Agents are people in different

roles, with different responsibilities and authorities

in an organization. In addition, based on the

subjectivist paradigm, which regards reality as a

social construct focusing on behaviours of agents,

affordances are referred to as behaviours of an

organism made available by some combined

structures of the organism and its environment and

OD are used to indicate that some affordances can be

possible only if certain other affordances are

available. Figure 2 shows one of the OC for a project

management.

Based on OC, NAM gives a means to specify

general patterns of behaviours of agents. The

analysis of regularities of behaviours is focused on

COMPARISON BETWEEN THE BUSINESS MODELLING METHODS PROVIDED BY MEASUR AND RUP

433

the social, cultural and organizational norms that

govern agents' actions in the business domain.

Normally, a norm has a basic structure as follows:

whenever <condition>

if <state>

then <an agent>

is <”permitted”/”prohibited”/”obliged”>

to do <action>

In the fourth clause, “permitted”, “prohibited”

and “obliged” are three deontic operators, which are

equivalent to “may”, “must” and “must not”

respectively. Adopting the structure, a credit card

company may state a norm governing interest

charges as follows:

whenever an amount of outstanding credit

if more than 25 days after posting

then the card holder

is obliged

to pay the interest

2.3 The BMM Provided by RUP

Proposed in the later 1990s, RUP, an object oriented

software engineering process, has been gradually

accepted by IS industry and is widely used by IS

developers nowadays. In RUP, a good business

model consists of two major parts: a business use-

case model and a business object model (Heumann,

2003) and (Kruchten,

2003).

A business use-case model includes UML Use

Case Diagrams (UCD) containing business use

cases. Business use cases describe business

processes, which are illustrated as sequences of

actions that provide observable value to business

actors. To fully understand the purpose of a business,

developers must know whom the business interacts

with. Those “interactors” are business actors. For

example, in figure 3, the business use case

“Individual Check-in” interacts with the business

actor “Passenger”.

Figure 3: A UML use case diagram.

UML AD are recommended to illustrate

sequences of actions involved in business use cases

in detail. In UML AD, an activity state represents the

performance of an activity within the process. A

swim lane indicates who performs a given activity.

A transition shows what one activity state follows

another. A decision with a set of guard conditions

are defined to control which transition follows once

an activity is complete. For example, figure 4 shows

the UML activity diagram illustrating the sequence

of the actions involved in the business use cases

“individual Check-in” and “Baggage Handling” in

detail.

Figure 4: The UML activity diagram.

Whereas a business use-case model focuses on

sequences of actions involved in business processes,

a business object model focuses on business workers

and business entities involved in business processes

and their relationships. A business worker represents

a role or set of roles in a business, which interacts

with other business workers and manipulates

business entities. A business entity represents a

significant and persistent piece of information that is

manipulated by business actors and business

workers. For example, figure 5 shows the UML class

diagram illustrating parts of the business workers

and business entities involved in the business use

cases “individual Check-in” and “Baggage

Handling” and their relationships.

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434

Figure 5: The UML class diagram.

3 COMPARISON BETWEEN

THE BMMS

To compare the two BMMs, their relationship must

be firstly identified.

According to the previous introduction of OC,

UML UCD and CD, it is quite apparent that all of

them are used mainly to define meanings of

terminology used in business models. Therefore,

from view of the semiotic framework, all of them

concern with semantics of the framework.

Although purposes in communications are

difficult to model by formal means, their underlying

mechanisms can be understood by studying social

norms at the social level (Liu, 2000). Therefore,

from view of the semiotic framework, norms are the

formal result concerning with both pragmatics and

social world of the framework. Likewise, purposes

in communications are not modelled formally and

obviously in UML AD either. However,

communications between business actors and

business workers are obviously and formally

represented in them, which make the analysis of

purposes much easier. Moreover, although norms are

not specified in UML AD, business rules, which are

similar to norms and generally state that if conditions

are met, certain events will happen or actions will be

taken, are hidden behind them. For example, in

figure 4, following the structure defined in (Liu and

Ong, 1999), the business rule hidden behind the

transition pointing to the activity state “Get

preferences” can be explicitly expressed as follows:

if the reservation

is correct

then get preferences

To sum up, from view of the semiotic

framework, UML AD concern with both pragmatics

and social world of the framework too.

Table 1 summarizes the relationship of the two

BMMs from the semiotic framework view.

Table 1: The relationship of the two BMMs.

MEASUR RUP

Methods Formal

results

Methods Formal

results

Semantics SAM OC UML

UCD and

modelling

methods

UML

UCD

and

Pragmatics NAM Norms UML AD

modelling

method

UML

Social

world

Based on table 1, the two BMMs can then be

compared. Here, the comparison focus is on the

formal results respectively in semantics, pragmatics

and social world of the semiotic framework. The

purpose of the comparison is to find obvious merits

and drawbacks each of the formal results has. Table

2 shows the result of the comparison.

Table 2: The result of the comparison.

Formal

results

Obvious merits Obvious

drawbacks

Seman

tics

OC Model OD directly

and clearly

Narrowly used

UML

UCD

and CD

Widely used No OD are defined

Pragm

atics

Norms Three deontic

operators are

specified

(i) Purposes are

not modelled

formally and

obviously;

(ii)

Communications

are not modelled

directly and

obviously;

(iii) Narrowly used

UML

(i)

Communications

are modelled

directly and

obviously;

(ii) Widely used

(i) Purposes are

not modelled

formally and

obviously;

(ii) No deontic

operators are

defined

Social

world

Norms Three deontic

operators are

specified

Narrowly used

UML

Widely used Business rules

rather than norms

are specified

indirectly

As shown in table 2, for UML UCD, CD and

AD, it is their obvious merits that they are all widely

COMPARISON BETWEEN THE BUSINESS MODELLING METHODS PROVIDED BY MEASUR AND RUP

435

used by current IS developers because UML has

been approved by the Object Management

Organization (OMG) as a standard since 1997. On

the contrary, for both OC and norms, it is their

obvious drawbacks that they are used at present only

by a small group of people and no commercial effort

has been made to popularize them yet. Moreover, at

the semantics level, as an important and

indispensable relationship, OD are modelled directly

and clearly in OC but not defined in UML UCD and

CD (Xie, Liu and Emmitt, 2003), (Bonacin,

Baranauskas and Liu, 2004) and (Ades, Poernomo

and Tsaramirsis, 2007). At the pragmatics level,

three deontic operators are specified in norms but not

defined in UML AD, which make the presentations

of communications and the analysis of purposes in

communications more precise. On the other side,

UML AD can model communications directly and

obviously but norms cannot, which make the

analysis of purposes in communications much easier.

At last, it is their common drawbacks that purposes

in communications cannot be modelled formally and

obviously in both of them. At the social world level,

similarly, three deontic operators are specified in

norms. However, in UML AD, business rules rather

than norms are specified indirectly. As stated in (Liu

and Ong, 1999): “with the help of the deontic

operators, norms can handle both business rules and

exceptions, which are situations difficult to

anticipate and specify in advance and are situations,

where decisions occur on an ad hoc basis and are

made solely on human judgment”.

4 THE METHOD TO EXTEND

UML AD

As Kecheng Liu stated that “A sound modelling

method must cover the issues in semantic, pragmatic

and social aspects. Issues at the three semiotic levels

are closely related. The focus must be first on

semantic issues. A model containing a clear

description about the organization, which may be in

terms of general patterns of actions, states, etc., is

the first bases for further analysis. The model of this

kind can be taken as a foundation on which the

intentions of actions can be discussed. Furthermore,

the rationales, limits and consequences of the actions

at the social level can be addressed” (Liu, 2000).

As pointed out previously, UML AD can model

communications directly and obviously but norms

cannot, which make the analysis of purposes in

communications much easier. In addition, UML AD

are widely used by current IS developers as an OMG

standard. Furthermore, although no deontic operators

are defined in UML AD, it is not hard to extend

them with “permitted”, “prohibited” and “obliged”

to handle exceptions as norms. In conclusion, it is

more reasonable to choose UML AD rather than

norms as the formal results to model business both at

the pragmatics and the social world level in the

combined BMM envisaged, which is supposed to

keep the merits and avoid the drawbacks each of the

BMMs has.

To extend UML AD with “permitted”,

“prohibited” and “obliged”, only three simple rules

below have to be followed:

 Each transition pointing to an activity state

should be extended with one of the three

deontic operators;

 When the “permitted” or the “prohibited” is

used, the text “permitted” or the text

“prohibited” must appear at the end of the

guard condition and separated with the guard

condition by “/”;

 When the “obliged” is used, the text “obliged”

can be omitted. Otherwise, it should appear at

the same place as the other two.

For example, figure 6 shows the UML activity

diagram derived from a slight modification of a

Workflow Activity Diagram (WAD) used in (Liu

and Ong,

1999) by complementing the “Customer”

and the “Insurance agent” swim lanes, the start state

and the end state.

Following the rules proposed above, figure 7

shows the UML activity diagram extended, which

expresses the same meaning with the WAD extended

by norms illustrated in (Liu and Ong,

1999) but in a

much simpler and more direct way. In figure 7, the

norm hidden behind the transition pointing to the

activity state “Accept form” can be explicitly

expressed as follows:

whenever an form has been accessed

if criteria are met

then an insurance agent

is permitted

to accept the form

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436

Figure 6: The UML activity diagram derived.

Figure 7: The UML activity diagram extended.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Business modelling is a primary task in information

systems development lifecycle. Although both

MEASUR and RUP provide their own BMM, each

has obvious merits and drawbacks. In order to devise

a combined BMM, which can keep the merits and

avoid the drawbacks at the same time, in this paper,

comparison between the two BMMs respectively

from semantics, pragmatics and social world of the

semiotic framework is specified. The method to

extend UML AD with the deontic operators

“permitted”, “prohibited” and “obliged” is proposed.

Based on the comparison specified and the

method proposed, it is the next task to devise the

complete combined BMM and to test it in practice.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was sponsored by the Beijing Philosophy

and Social Science Research Centre for Beijing

Transportation Development and the Scientific

Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas

Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry.

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