The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a business. SBVR is intended to formalize complex compliance rules, such as operational rules for an enterprise, security policy, standard compliance, or regulatory compliance rules. Such formal vocabularies and rules can be interpreted and used by computer systems. SBVR is an integral part of the OMG's model-driven architecture (MDA).
Overview The SBVR standard defines the vocabulary and rules for documenting the semantics of business vocabularies, business facts, and business rules; as well as an XMI schema for the interchange of business vocabularies and business rules among organizations and between software tools. SBVR allows the production of business vocabularies and rules; vocabulary plus rules constitute a shared domain model with the same expressive power of standard ontological languages. SBVR allows multilingual development, since it is based on separation between symbols and their meaning. SBVR enables making business rules accessible to software tools, including tools that support the business experts in creating, finding, validating, and managing business rules, and tools that support the information technology experts in converting business rules into implementation rules for automated systems. SBVR uses OMG's Meta-Object Facility (MOF) to provide interchange capabilities MOF/XMI mapping rules, enable generating MOF-compliant models and define an XML schema. SBVR proposes Structured English as one of possibly many notations that can map to the SBVR Metamodel. SBVR and Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) are designed as two parts of a unique OMG Technology Stack for software analytics related to existing software systems. KDM defines an ontology related to software artifacts and thus provides an initial formalization of the information related to a software system. SBVR can be further used to formalize complex compliance rules related to the software.
Background Business rules represent the primary means by which an organization can direct its business, defining the operative way to reach its objectives and perform its actions. A rule-based approach to managing business and the information used by that business is a way of identifying and articulating the rules which define the structure and control the operation of an enterprise it represents a new way to think about enterprise and its rules, in order to enable a complete business representation made by and for business people. Business rules can play an important role in defining business semantics: they can influence or guide behaviours and support policies, responding to environmental situations and events. Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is the OMG implementation of the business rules approach.
History In June 2003 OMG issued the Business Semantics of Business Rule (BSBR) Request For Proposal, in order to create a standard to allow business people to define the policies and rules by which they run their business in their own language, in terms of the things they deal with in the business, and to capture those rules in a way that is clear, unambiguous and readily translatable into other representations. The SBVR proposal was developed by the Business Rules Team, a consortium organized in August 2003 to respond to the BSBR RFP. In September 2005, The Business Modeling and Integration Task Force and the Architecture Board of the Object Management Group approved the proposal Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) to become a final adopted specification in response to the RFP. Later SBVR proposal was ratified by the Domain Technical Committee (DTC), approved of the OMG Board of Directors, and SBVR finalization task force was launched to convert the proposal into ISO/OMG standard format and perform final editing prior to release as an OMG formal specification. In January 2008, the finalization phase was completed and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), Version 1.0 formal specification was released and is publicly available at the Catalog of OMG Business Strategy, Business Rules and Business Process Management Specifications web page.
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