Use-case models play an essential role in software development processes.They are used to specify functional requirements, estimate software development project efforts, and plan iterations.The use-case model is subject to change as requirements are modified, or the model is refactored.Therefore, it is essential that the use-case model is not redundant and its parts are reusable.Existing approaches for use-case model specification support reusability in a limited way.This paper fills the gap.It introduces a new approach to conveniently yet semi-formally specifying the entire use-case model.The paper presents the Use-Case Flow Language metamodel, consisting of its abstract syntax and a description of the semantics of the metamodel elements.A concrete textual syntax of the language is also provided and informally described.An example of a usecase model specified in the proposed notation is presented in the paper.

The following paper is the next step of research on automatic processing of business rules expressed in natural language. Such rules are used to describe a selected universe of discourse - its properties and constraints. They are usually written with a text editor as a set of free-form sentences. The purpose of the paper is to propose a method for verifying the compatibility of business rules with a domain specification in the form of a UML class diagram. Such verification is performed at the syntax level. While our previous research has focused on processing only simple sentences, this paper presents a method for analyzing compound sentences. The usefulness of our ideas has been experimentally demonstrated.

Ontology alignment, although widely researched and discussed, has still some issues that need addressing. One of those is designating alignments of relations defined in two independent ontologies. According to the found literature, this topic is frequently omitted by many state-of-the-art ontology alignment solutions, that focus mainly on aligning concepts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to designating mappings of ontology relations, which is based on fuzzy logic. It is used to combine several different similarity measures calculated between elements that are used to define relations. The approach has been experimentally verified using the widely accepted datasets provided by Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, yielding promising results.

Business rules are used to define or limit certain aspects of business. While they should be understandable for different interested parties, including business analysts, end-users, programmers, or testers, it is also highly recommendable that computers efficiently process them. Business rules can be expressed using different languages (styles), potentially influencing their quality. The main aim of this research is to determine which of the business rule specification notations used at early stages of software development (CIM level) is the best for different groups of recipients. The paper presents the results of the experiment designed to compare the usability of two business rule specification languages: SBVR SP (Polish version of SBVR SE), and RuleSpeak®. These languages have very similar expressiveness and scope of application. Both introduce some restrictions on word order (grammar) and expressions used. Their usability was assessed from three perspectives: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. The study was conducted on three groups of participants representing various user groups. It occurred that SBVR SP is more useful than RuleSpeak.