boro - the approach

The boro approach has at its core a foundational ontology and a closely intertwined approach to information re-engineering - whose most recent incarnation is called bCLEARer™. It started development in the late 1980s and was first publicly documented in the mid-1990s (see Business Objects). It is a data-driven approach, reflecting its roots in legacy system re-engineering. Since its emergence, there has been significant development of the approach; this includes:

• The development of BORO-UML modelling tool support, including a variant of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) called BUML (or BORO-UML) and tools to migrate these models into other repositories, including relational databases.
• The development of both syntactic and semantic test beds and data loading tools to facilitate incorporating large datasets into the boro models.
• The development of reusable business domain models for a number of business domains.
• The extension of the original methodology to handle the re-engineering of unstructured data.

It is now capable of building enterprise-wide ontologies, integrating information from information systems, semi-structured data (such as spreadsheets) and unstructured documents.

bCLEARer™ is a powerful tool for mining ontologies from existing systems.