Books & essays on the meaning behind your data.
From Business Rule Solutions — on how organizations think, decide, and make their knowledge work, in the age of AI.
The Ontology Pipeline is Broken: Why Your Data Strategy is Waiting Too Late to Talk to the Business
More on Human-Centered Enterprise Semantics
The so-called ‘ontology pipeline’ is seductive, organized – and fundamentally wrong.
Accurate Data. Wrong Decision. What’s Missing?
Knowing your customer data isn’t the same as knowing how your business works.
Data is Not Language: W3C/RDF vs. SBVR
Adding a shape to a linguistic problem is like trying to fix a misunderstanding in a conversation by writing a stricter dress code for the speakers.
The Truth Bridge: W3C/RDF vs. SBVR
The W3C/RDF stack jumps straight from a triple to an assumed truth.
![Side-by-side panels: in RDF / OWL, "knows" links Alice to Bob and Organization A to Organization B alike; in an SBVR verb concept, "knows" is bound to [Person] and [Person]](https://assets.brspublications.com/articles/verb-concepts-w3c-rdf-vs-sbvr/banner.webp)
Verb Concepts: W3C/RDF vs. SBVR
True interoperability comes from knowing which things can – and more importantly cannot – relate.
Business Rules vs. Requirements
The business rules exist independently of the solution we choose to implement.
How the W3C/RDF vs. SBVR Distinctions Apply to LLMs and Prompt Engineering
LLMs are fundamentally linguistic and conceptual engines – they naturally speak the structured natural language of SBVR, not the flat math of RDF.
Human-Centered Enterprise Semantics
The comparison between the W3C stack and SBVR is not a battle of file formats; it is a fundamental choice between data-centric linking and human-centered semantics.
Is AI Like Knitting?
AI is a tool. Like a knitting machine, it can only produce from the pattern it's given — and the quality still depends entirely on the inputs.
Inside the Mind of an Organization
Inside the Mind of an Organization shows why so many modern failures – conflicting answers, ambiguous policies, unreliable data, and GenAI hallucinations – are not technology problems at all. They are failures of meaning.
BRSdata Capability Matrix™
A capability map for understanding what data teams should be responsible and accountable for across the organization.
The Data Organization Spectrum
A framework for deciding whether data work should be centralized, democratized, federated, or somewhere in between.
What's Your Data Culture Plan for 2023?
A month-by-month plan for improving data trust, data communications, and senior-leadership support.
Your Next Data Skill is Stakeholder Empathy
Why data professionals need to understand stakeholder workflows, goals, questions, and concerns.
Data Culture Issues and How to Fix Them
How fear of data, inconsistent vocabulary, and mistrust undermine data culture, plus ways to address them.
Understanding Data In Your Organization
A wholistic view of the data ecosystem across quality, freshness, culture, and outcomes.
Current State Analysis of Your Data – Part 2 – Data Freshness
A stakeholder-oriented guide to understanding whether data is available when people need it.
Current State Analysis of Your Data – Part 3 – Data Culture
A practical current-state lens for understanding the human side of data management.
Current State Analysis of Your Data – Part 1
A starting point for understanding data quality, data freshness, data culture, and data-driven outcomes.
Merit America
BRSdata helped Merit America design and staff its first data organization, then coached data stakeholders across the nonprofit.
AIRA-COVID 19 Response
BRSdata helped AIRA craft unified vaccination vocabulary across the organizations managing COVID-19 response data.
The Four BRS Dimensions of Semantic Quality: A Business View of Data and Data Quality
A business perspective on why data quality problems are really problems of meaning, context, and communication.
Rules: Shaping Behavior and Knowledge
This book is about rules for groups and communities of people (including their data). The goal? Shaping behavior and communicating business knowledge, not simply mimicking human intelligence. It’s exactly what you need for governance, traceability, and the human touch so often missing in digital solutions.
Business Knowledge Messaging
Better Policy, Guidance, Data & Requirements
Business Knowledge Blueprints
“How to Achieve a Common Business Language“
Building Business Solutions
How can you put the “business” into business analysis? How do you deliver true business value? What should you be doing before requirements?
Business Rule Concepts
Easy-to-understand explanation of business vocabulary, business rules and business processes and how they relate!