This paper presents our work on adapting and extending natural language interface (NLI) to database technology to support the specification and violation reporting of business rules. The resulting system allows non-technical users to author and manage a rulebook in controlled natural language - serving as a single point of definition that can be compiled into SQL to generate violation reports. To achieve this we represent business rules in tuple calculus, handle negation in our query re-writing algorithms and add support for natural language reflexives (e.g. 'its', 'themselves', etc.). Our results show a large class of business rules can be captured with these extensions. Although our approach is general, we present it applied to compliance checking of regulations over a materiel capability development information system at the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration. At EDBT we will also demonstrate this work over a more generic package delivery domain. While there has been recent effort in pursuing Semantics for Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) in the semantic web and description logic communities, to our knowledge ours is the first attempt to provide this capability for ER-modeled relational databases.

In this paper we consider the processing of queries posed over multiple information resources that advertise their contents in terms of globally available, domain-specific ontologies. We describe a technique to identify the exact portion of a user's query that may not be answered by the set of available information agents. This is achieved by reasoning over the advertisements of the agents relative to the user's query. Our technique is based on the realization that the set difference of the queries q/sub 1/ and q/sub 2/ may be computed as a syntactic manipulation of the expressions q/sub 1/ and q/sub 2/ for a well defined subset of the relational algebra over a restricted class of relational schemas. That is to say, one may, without materializing data, take the expressions for q/sub 1/ and q/sub 2/ apply the query difference formula to yield q/sub 3/, and be guaranteed that q/sub 3/ is logically equivalent to q/sub 1/-q/sub 2/. With this query difference operator defined, the ability to compute query intersection, subsumption and equivalence follow. These claims are formally defined and proven and an example from an on-line movie guide domain is provided. In addition to the identification of missing resource agents, we anticipate a number of other applications of the query difference operator. This includes, but is not limited to, limiting the generality of dynamically constructed user queries, efficient query planning, and monitoring and controlling access to sensitive information.