The naming of entities, relationships and attributes is an important consideration when creating a rulebase.
Choose a name for a relationship
Document the naming convention for a project
Entities should be named using the definite article 'the', as in 'the family', 'the child', 'the friend', 'the school' etc.
When creating a relationship you should give the relationship a meaningful name. Remember that the relationship describes the reference from one entity instance to one or more of another entity instance. The relationship name should therefore include the target entity text so that it is clear from the relationship name who the relationship is to.
The name of the relationship should reflect the everyday expression used to describe the relationship (if there is one), and should be clear in and out of context what is being referred to. Try to consider that nature of the relationship you are capturing and give it a name that represents this relationship.
Where you are referring to a single instance ("to-one" relationships), your relationship text must therefore be singular. When you are referring to multiple instances ("to-many" relationships), your relationship text must be plural. Where one entity is the global entity, you may simply refer to the target entity.
Relationship type | Entity 1 | Entity 2 | Relationship text |
---|---|---|---|
One-to-one | "the child" | "the friend" | "the child's best friend" |
Many-to-one | "the child" | "the family" | "the child's family" |
One-to-many | "the family" | "the child" | "the children" |
Many-to-many | "the child" | "the friend" | "the child's friends" |
Self-referential one-to-one | "the child" | "the child" | "the child's twin" |
Selecting correct attribute wording is fundamental to capturing logic accurately in your Oracle Policy Modeling application and conveying information to a user in a meaningful way. Specifically, attribute text influences:
The following general principles apply to the writing of Oracle Policy Modeling boolean attributes (statements).
See also:
When creating non-boolean attributes (variables) the following guidelines apply:
A Rulebase Naming Conventions document should be created at the start of every Oracle Policy Modeling project to clearly set out a consistent method of wording statements and variables. This is critical because automatic linking will only work when statements and variables are an exact text match. If different rule developers use different text when creating separate chunks of rules the attributes will not tie together. The Rulebase Naming Conventions document should define which nouns will be capitalized and whether particular acronyms should be used.
The Rulebase Naming Conventions document can be kept in the Oracle Policy Modeling project under Documents/Design.