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1. Semantics of Business
Vocabulary

2. SBVR Formal Grounding Model Interpretation
• A conceptual model includes both a conceptual schema and a population of facts that
conform to the schema.
• A conceptual model may cover any desired time span, and contain facts concerning the
past, present, or future.
• This notion is distinct from changes made to a conceptual model.
• Any change to a conceptual model, including any change to any fact in the fact
population, creates a different conceptual model.
• Each conceptual model is distinct and independent, although there may be relationships
between conceptual models that share the same conceptual schema.

3. SBVR Formal Grounding Model Interpretation
• ‘Facts’ are one of the primary building blocks of the formal interpretation of SBVR
• A ‘Ground Fact’ is of a particular ‘Fact Type.’
• The lowest level logical unit in SBVR – an ‘Atomic Formulation’ – is a logical formulation based
directly upon a verb concept, involving no logical operation.
• An atomic formulation may be considered as an invocation of a predicate.
 formal interpretation of SBVR presented makes no distinction about how facts are known:
 'ground facts' or obtained by inference.
 Inferences can be performed within a particular fact model.
 The formal interpretation of SBVR presented does not define any kind of inference that can
be made between fact models.

4. • Control over the order in which inferences can be made is a common feature in the
automation of inference, as found, for example, in rules engines.
• SBVR deals with declarative rules expressed from a business perspective.
• Transitions between fact models and the mechanization of those rules in an automated
system are outside the scope of SBVR.
• The SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) vocabularies are used to
describe business vocabularies and business rules that may be expressed either informally
or formally.
• Business rule expressions are classified as formal only if they are expressed purely in terms
of noun concepts and verb concepts, as well as certain logical/ mathematical operators,
quantifiers, etc.
SBVR Formal Grounding Model Interpretation

5. Facts, Schemas, and Models
• “universe of discourse” indicates those aspects of the business that are of interest.
• “business domain” is commonly used in the modeling community, with equivalent meaning.
• “model,” is a structure intended to describe a business domain, and is composed of a
conceptual schema (fact structure) and a population of ground facts.
• fact is a proposition taken to be true by the business.
• Population facts are restricted to elementary and existential facts.
 Instantiated roles of facts refer to individuals (“Employee 123” or “the sales department”).
 These individuals are considered as being of a particular type (“Employee” or “Department”)
where type denotes “set of possible individuals.”

6. SBVR’s kinds of concept:
 ‘general concept’,
 ‘individual noun concept’
 ‘verb concept’
logical underpinnings of these three kinds of concepts are:
 ‘type of individual’,
 singleton ‘type of individual’
 ‘fact type’
Facts, Schemas, and Models

7. • General concepts logically map to types of individual.
 Each type of individual is a set of possible instances of the general concept according to
a set of possible existential facts that can be formulated based on reference schemes.
• Individual noun concepts logically map to singleton types of individuals.
 Each single type of individual has exactly one element, which is the instance of the
individual noun concept.

8. • Verb concepts map to fact types, each fact type being a set of possible ground facts
that can be formulated based on the verb concept and that use reference schemes to
identify, for each fact, each thing that fills each role.
• The conceptual schema declares:
1. concepts, fact types (kinds of facts, such as “Employee works for Department”)
2. rules relevant to the business domain.

9. • Rules:
 are effectively higher-level facts (i.e., facts about propositions)
 considered under the generic term ‘fact.’
 “ground fact” is used here to explicitly exclude such (meta) facts.
 Constraints are used to define bounds, borders, or limits on fact populations, and may be
static or dynamic.

10.  Static constraint imposes a restriction on what fact populations are possible or permitted, for
each fact population taken individually.
 Dynamic constraint imposes a restriction on transitions between fact populations.
 Derivation rules indicate how the population of a fact type may be derived from the populations
of one or more fact types or how a type of individual may be defined in terms of other types of
individuals and fact types.