Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules

The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) intended to be the basis for a 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 enterprize, 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).

SBVR is an innovative language based on a fact-oriented approach allowing semantic interoperability between models and tools in heterogeneous environment; and semantic integrations between communities.

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 concepts. 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 SVBR 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 atrifacts 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.