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The Truth Bridge: W3C/RDF vs. SBVR

More on Human-Centered Enterprise Semantics

By Ronald G. Ross20261 min read

The top of the SBVR Truth-Bridge diagram: the Cognitive Layer, where meaning exists, then Proposition, which holds the true/false value, leading to State of Affairs, any conceivable scenario, real or imagined

Why RDF falls short for complex business logic – and why SBVR wins.

The W3C/RDF stack jumps straight from a triple to an assumed truth. SBVR, by contrast, provides the ontological scaffolding (the bridge) needed to talk about hypothetical situations vs. real-world actualities, making it uniquely suited for rigorous business logic.

To understand how SBVR bridges the gap between human thought and the real world, it helps to visualize its metamodel layers. SBVR builds an explicit, multi-layered bridge, as illustrated in the graphic.

Diagram “The Structural Map of the SBVR Truth-Bridge”, from the Cognitive Layer (where meaning exists) down to the Linguistic Layer: Proposition (holds the true/false logical value, the truth-bearer) claims or denotes a State of Affairs (any conceivable scenario, real or imagined), which is classified as an Actuality if true in reality (the physical, historical event or situation, the truth-maker); an Actuality instantiates or fills the roles of a Verb Concept (the definition or structural template, e.g. “customer places order”), which is expressed by a Statement (the actual natural language text token)

If you were to draw the diagram for the W3C/RDF stack, all the following would be missing:

Proposition
State of Affairs
Actuality

RDF moves directly from the input text string to a graph node assertion, which is why it cannot natively reason about hypothetical or unfulfilled rules.

Because Actuality exists as a distinct node in the SBVR metamodel you can natively treat real-world events as objects in your expressions. For example, you can write a statement that treats that real-world event as an object: "The actuality that Ron works for BRSolutions creates a conflict of interest with Company Y."

P.S. ‘Proposition’ is a really weird thing to miss if you’re dealing with sentences and LLMs(!).

The Author

Ronald G. Ross

Co-Founder, Business Rule Solutions, LLC

Ron is one of the world’s foremost authorities on both structured and unstructured data. He is Co-Founder and Principal of Business Rule Solutions, LLC (BRS). At BRS, he has helped create concept models at hundreds of companies and government bodies.

Ron is Chair of Building Business Capabilities (BBC), the official conference of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®). He is best known for his industry-leading work on business rules, and before that, for his contributions in the field of data design and database. He was a founder and is a principal in standards work at OMG on SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules), the ground-breaking standard behind concept models.

Ron has keynoted dozens of conferences and given seminars to many thousands of people worldwide. He is currently Executive Editor of BRCommunity.com and its flagship on-line publication, Business Rules Journal. Ron is recognized internationally as the ‘father of business rules.’

Ron is the author of ten professional books including the first on data dictionaries and data administration in 1981. Books on business rules include the classic Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge 4th ed. (2013) and Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules 2nd ed. with Gladys S.W. Lam (2015). He is co-author with John Zachman and Roger Burlton of the 2017 Business Agility Manifesto.

Ron received DAMA International’s Individual Achievement Award for 1995. He was formerly Editor of the Data Base Newsletter from 1977 to 1998. Ron holds an M.S. in information science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and a B.A. from Rice University.

rross@brsolutions.com brsolutions.com

Ronald G. Ross is Co-Founder of Business Rule Solutions and author of Business Knowledge Blueprints.

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