1 The TEMPORA Deductive Repository: Metamodelling and Validation Support Petros Alexakis and Babis Theodoulidis Information Systems Group Department of Computation UMIST Abstract In this paper, the development of the TEMPORA Metamodel in the deductive Database Management System MegaLog is described. This provides the basis for the development of an analysis tool for verification and validation of the TEMPORA specification. The functionality of this analysis tool with respect to the verification and validation of business rules expressed in the Conceptual Rule Language (CRL) is also elaborated. 1. Introduction The TEMPORA project addresses to the problems of developing reliable,flexible and maintainable business information systems. It is a five year research project and is partially funded by the Commission of the European Communities under the Esprit R&D programme [TEMPORA 1991a]. The TEMPORA conceptual modelling formalism consists of the Entity Relationship Time (ERT) Model, the Conceptual Rule Language (CRL), and the Process Interaction Diagram (PID). The TEMPORA CASE tool environment has been implemented in the RAMATIC CASE Shell. RAMATIC has been developed by the Swedish Institute for systems Development (SISU). RAMATIC is a meta-tool for CASE tool implementation. RAMATIC does not support analysis and verification on a higher level of complexity, but needs to rely on some other component for these tasks. Currently, an object-oriented language called BIM Probe is used to implement the TEMPORA metamodel [TEMPORA 1991b]. In this paper, the use of MegaLog, a deductive DBMS, is discussed in order to implement the TEMPORA Specification Repository. The architecture of the overall environment is depicted in figure 1. As shown in this figure, the information captured by the corresponding capture tools is stored in the specification repository. The analysis tools interact with the specification repository in order to provide a full completeness and consistency checking. Section 2 of this paper discusses the role of metamodelling in information systems development. A detailed account of the issues relating to the role and functionality of metamodelling formalisms is also given. Section 3 introduces the representation of the TEMPORA metamodel in the deductive database management system MegaLog. In particular, the TEMPORA metamodel is expressed in terms of ERT and an algorithm is defined for mapping the TEMPORA metamodel to MegaLog. Section 4 overviews the CRL language and discusses its functionality with regard to the modelling of business rules. Section 5 elaborates on the verification and validation functionality of the CRL language. In particular, a set of