Early in 2004, the BRG (as a part of the 'Business Rules Team') responded to an RFP from the Object Management Group (OMG), entitled Business Semantics of Business Rules (BSBR).  In 2005, the BRT's final submission, the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), was accepted by the OMG to move into the 'finalization' stage of the OMG standardization process.  In September 2007, work on the first version of the Standard was completed, with the acceptance of the "SBVR Beta 3 Specification" by the OMG Architecture Board at its Jacksonville meeting.  The SBVR Version 1.0 Specification received final approval at the December 2007 OMG meeting in Burlingame, CA, and it is now available on the OMG website.  The evolution of the Standard continues, under the Charter of the SBVR 1.1 Revision Task Force.

In June 2003, the OMG's Business Enterprise Integration Task Force recommended, and the Domain Technical Committee issued, the Business Semantics of Business Rules (BSBR) RFP.  The objective of this RFP was to support modeling of business rules by business people in business language — natural language, common graphics, and tables. 

The Business Rules Group joined one of the submitter groups to prepare a response to the BSBR RFP.  Throughout 2004 and 2005, we participated actively as a member of The Business Rules Team (BRT).  The BRT, which was formed specifically to respond to this RFP, was a consortium supported by more than 20 organizations from 6 countries.  The Business Rules Group was one of five organizations represented on the consortium board. 

In September 2005, the Team's submission — the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) — moved into the finalization stage of the OMG's standards adoption process.  The original BSBR RFP is available to OMG members for download. 

In March 2006, the first Interim Specification document of the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) standard was issued, replacing the Submission Document (bei/05-08-01), the Draft Adopted Specification (dtc/05-11-01), and the Final Adopted Specification (dtc/06-03-01).  The comment period was open through July 24, 2006. 

The SBVR Version 1.0 Specification has been published and is now available on the OMG website, along with a set of supporting files.

How well do you know SBVR?  Try your hand at the SBVR Crossword Puzzle.

And now ... do you want to check your work?  Here is the solution to the Puzzle.

The OMG is best known for its role in IT standards, such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).  'Business Semantics of Business Rules' is part of the OMG's current initiative on Model Driven Architecture (MDA), which seeks to address business requirements as well as IT system concerns.

"The objective of this RFP is 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, but in ways that are clear, unambiguous and readily translatable by Information systems experts into executable rules for many kinds of automated systems."
    ~ (from the BSBR RFP)

The OMG has also requested related proposals, addressing business process specification, rule management, and the representation of production rules.

Proposals accepted by the OMG membership will be the basis for development of standards for business rules and business processes, which, over the next couple of years, should take their place alongside OMG technical standards.

One of the OMG's important objectives is to encourage development of tools to support recommended standards.  So we should expect to see new tools for capturing and managing rules, for exchanging vocabularies and rules between organizations, and for automatic transformation into IT systems.