In this regard, it might be worth looking at Martin Fowler's work, as
published in his book "Analysis Patterns" and continued on his home page
(sorry, I don't have the URL handy). He uses a variant of the design
pattern approach along with one of the object-oriented graphical notations
to describe a number of business concepts. One of his principles is to
explicitly separate descriptions into an object level and what he calls "the
knowledge level". Of course, much of the value of the patterns is in the
informal discussions of context, alternatives, scope of applicability, etc.
The patterns he presents are distillations of a number of practical
applications in several business areas (hospital administration is the most
frequent source of examples). I'd be interested to hear someone contrast
his approach with the more formal approaches used in this community.
Don Dwiggins "Solvitur Ambulando"
SEI Information Technology
dwig@earthlink.net