Semantic of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) supports specification of business rules:
- From an organization perspective - not an IT system perspective
- Using the vocabulary of the business - not the vocabulary of its IT models
- Regardless of whether the rules can be, or will be, automated
View some sample SBVR rules to get the flavor of SBVR Structured English.
SBVR concepts describe the world in which the business operates. SBVR vocabularies and rules are developed for the business policy makers. SBVR documents are expressed in structured natural language. SBVR specifications can be transformed into IT specifications, such as database schemas, rules and workflow models and operation manuals. SBVR specification can exist independently of the IT specifications.
SBVR rules are important for assessing compliance of the IT specifications to the business policy.
- Source: John Hall, Metadata Open Forum, 2007. Click on the image to enlarge
SBVR rules are based on facts, and facts are based on terms. Here is a brief introduction into the process of developing SBVR rules.
- Start with a fact type, e.g.
rental has driver
- Add a modal operator (from a limited set, defined in SBVR, such as ''it is obligatory'', ''it is necessary'', etc.), e.g.
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it is obligatory that rental has driver
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Quantify and qualify:
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Add quantifiers to roles in the fact type (''each'', ''at least one'', ''no more than N'', etc.):
it is obligatory that each rental has at least one driver
it is obligatory that each rental has no more than 4 drivers
Use additional fact types as qualifiers (''the location of the return branch the rental'')
Add conditions based on fact types (''if a rental return is more than 4 hours late '')
It is important to specify the vocabulary consisting of precise terms (nouns phrases) and fact types (verb phrases), since rule formulation starts always starts with a fact type.
A fact type is turned into a rule by adding a modal operator, and then quantifiers and qualifiers. Additional fact types can be used as qualifiers. View some sample SBVR vocabulary and rules definitions to get an idea of how policy statements can be expressed against a controlled vocabulary using structured natural language.
SBVR specification is uniquely positioned among OMG and W3C specifications. It is aligned with foundational specifications such as the OMG Meta Object Facility (MOF) and W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL) since it defines a generic ''vocabulary for defining vocabularies''.
SBVR is aligned with ontologies and meta-modeling. Click on image to enlarge
SBVR provides capabilities similar to MOF and OMG Object Constraint Language (OCL), which are the foundation for the Unified Modeling Language (UML). However SBVR capabilities are related to natural language expression of vocabularies and rules. SBVR is aligned with OMG Business Process Management specifications, such as Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), since it directly supports business policy makers, rather than the underlying IT systems.
Source: John Hall, Metadata Open Forum, 2007. Click on image to enlarge
The following diagram is important for understanding SBVR. This specification is about precise semantics for business vocabulary and rules. SBVR defines a set of modeling elements that unambiguously define the precise meaning of statements expressed in natural language.
SBVR defines how natural language statements can be exchanged as precise XML documents