During the March 2017 OMG Technical Meeting, the Object Management Group's Board of Directors approved a new version (v1.4) of SBVR ("Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules") for publication.  As soon as the OMG publication process is complete, SBVR v1.4 will be freely available to the general public on the OMG's website at http://www.omg.org/spec/SBVR/.

This revision of SBVR was a very focused one, targeted on clarifying — for the business audience — the definitions of the various kinds of SBVR elements of guidance and element of guidance statements.  Most of the changes made in the v1.4 revision are related to this significant improvement for the business community.

Related to this, the preferred terms for the two main kinds of business rules were swapped with their synonyms so that the more business-oriented term for each is now the preferred term:  definitional business rule and behavioral business rule.

There were several small, isolated fixes included in v1.4 as well:

• Defined the meaning of "is violated" when talking about 'behavioral business rules' as the correct understanding of this concept is fundamental to discussions about behavioral business rules.


• Fixed an unintended consequence in the definition of 'rulebook'.


• Fixed the definition of 'business rule' to make its "is practicable" characteristic explicit.


• Added the concept of 'rule set' which is referenced in the normative SBVR Clause 23 but was not defined in SBVR.


• Added to SBVR Annex A ("SBVR Structured English") three SBVR Structured English keywords that are used in Clauses 7–21 but had not been specified in Annex A.

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