SBVR is a OMG standard for natural language rules and vocabularies (nominally using English). We think SBVR (Structured Business Vocabulary for Rules) is an important and useful standard, which can be used for rules interchange in a "source" and human readable format (which RuleML and RIF are not aiming to do).

From a users point of view, there are 2 main aspects to using SBVR:

• The SBVR vocabulary

• The rules themselves - which are written according to the SBVR vocab.

SBVR is a MDA framework, which defined a "Computation Independent Model" - what that means to you, is that SVBR is designed primarily for human consumption. However, it is defined in terms of formal logic, and detailed enough to generate models and rules for a specific platform.

We are working with These guys to have tooling and a SBVR framework to author rules, and manage vocabularies for JBoss Rules (narrowing SBVR down to production rules to start with).

The first steps are a proof of concept to generate DRL rules from SBVR.

The SBVR model is also being investigated as a generic "business object model" for the rule engine to use (regardless of if SBVR is used).

DEMOs attached

The zip file contains a "movie" of the SBVR vocab and rule editor in actions, download, unzip and open the HTML file and it will run.

The PDF is the specification of SBVR (makes a bit more sense after you watch the demo).