Business rules can be defined as statements about how the business is done, i.e., about guidelines and restrictions with respect to states and processes in an organization [1996]. Originally, the term was used with reference to integrity conditions in Entity-Relationship-Models or in NIAM. More powerful business rules can be described according to the Event-Condition-Action (ECA) paradigm developed for active Database Mana-gement Systems. From this point of view, business rules trigger an action of the IS, send an alerter to a human actor, or define the feasible space for human actions. There-fore, the rules are not necessarily prescriptive but may also be semi-structured or "soft". Recently, the important role of business rules in understanding the real system and, thus, in system analysis was stressed [1995,1996,1994].
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