1 Why SBVR? “Towards a Business Natural Language (BNL) for Financial Services” Panel “Demystifying Financial Services Semantics” Conference New York,13 March 2012 Donald Chapin Chair, OMG SBVR Revision Task Force Business Semantics Ltd [email protected]
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Why SBVR? “Towards a Business Natural Language (BNL) for Financial Services” Panel
“Demystifying Financial Services Semantics” Conference New York,13 March 2012
Donald Chapin Chair, OMG SBVR Revision Task Force Business Semantics Ltd [email protected]
Why Do We Need an fBNL? • For the same reason we need an English or French dictionary
• The financial business natural language already exists in all the communications in the financial industry
• … but the meanings can be fuzzy or not shared between authors and all the readers
• To minimize ambiguity in contracts, governance documentation & regulations
• Industry jargon needs definitions that are clear and unambiguous
• Terms often mean different things in different contexts or communities
• To have the meanings of financial industry terms in software tools that can understand the meanings
• To be able to extract more structured information from text documents
• To support semantic integration of business documentation and IT data
• To define requirements & design IT systems that implement the business meanings
• To reduce business costs of: • Misinterpretation of policy, data inconsistency, manual reconciliation & software misfits
SBVR Terminological Dictionary entries interest leg pays interest on notional amount of contract
IR swap
Synonym: interest rate swap Synonym: IR swap contract Synonym: IR swap agreement Definition: swap that has an interest rate that is exchanged for another
interest rate Dictionary basis An agreement to exchange interest rate cash flows, based on a
specified notional amount from a fixed rate to a floating rate (or vice versa) or from one floating rate to another.
Regulation A swap dealer can rely on the written representations of a counterparty to satisfy its due diligence requirements under the business conduct standards ...
CFTC: Federal Register / Vol. 77, No. 33 / Friday, February 17, 2012 / Rules and Regulations [page 9792]
Example Business Rules that partly implement the policy:
Each swap transaction that is initiated after April 17 2012 must be transacted under an ISDA master agreement.
Each end user swap transaction that is initiated after April 17 2012 must be transacted under an ISDA master agreement that has a schedule that includes a representation of eligibility that is for the end user counterparty of the ISDA master agreement.
SBVR Vocabulary (of some swap dealer)
Example Business Policy:
Each swap that falls under the new CFTC business conduct rules must be transacted under an ISDA master agreement that includes all due diligence representations required to satisfy CFTC.
Class 1 Definition: xxxxxxxxxxxxx Ref Scheme: Attr 1
Attr 1 Definition: xxxx that xxxxxxxx
Attr 1 references Class 1 Attr 2 Definition: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Class 1 has Attr 2 Class 1A Definition: Class1 that xxxx xxxxx
Class 1B connects Class 2 Definition: the Class1B xxx ...
Necessity: Each Class1B connects exactly two Class 2s
Necessity: Each Class 2 is connected by at most one Class 1B
Class 2 Definition: xxxx that xxxxxxxxxxxx
Etc ...
SBVR Vocabulary provides definitions
URI
Semantic anchor (URI)
URI
URI
URI
URI
Semantic anchors can reference them
Business Uses of SBVR
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance • Globalization/Localization and Translation • Communication and Documentation • Document and Content Index Creation • Business integration and Performance
Improvement • Training • Business Language–centered Requirements for
For a discussion of these Use Cases see “SBVR: What is Now Possible and Why?”: http://www.businesssemantics.com/BusinessSemanticsLtd/SBVR-WhatIsNowPossibleAndWhy.pdf
• Synonyms, Acronyms, Abbreviations, etc. + Multilingual Terms • Verb Concepts --. Relations among Concepts around Verbs that are patterns in sentences • Individual Concepts e.g. Business Events & Business Entities
+ Additional SBVR Semantic Features: • Business Communities as a context for sharing meanings and terms • Term is a given content has exactly one meaning -- shared across languages • Unambiguous Concepts -- definitions composed of adjectival phrases • Definitions, Relationships & Rules specified in formal logic • Enriched Concept Relations -- multidimensional classification, roles & perspectives • Reference Schemes for Individual Concepts
Rulebook + Behavioural Business Guidance:
• Business Policies, Rules and other kinds of Guidance governing Business Actions
= SBVR Business Vocabulary + Rules
“Why Isn’t an Ordinary Business Glossary Enough?”
1. No “good practice” used for creating business glossaries • Need definitions that are clear and unambiguous • Definitions need to reflect the meanings business people use when they
write governance documentation
2. No ability to ensure each meaning is entered only once • or to support semantic integration of multiple terminological dictionaries
3. No ability to define the same word/phrase differently in different context • while still ensuring that each term has only one meaning in a given
context
4. No basis for cohesion between definitions • or conceptual integrity of the glossary as a whole
5. Does not include defined sentence patterns that have specific meanings
SBVR: business owners/authors SBVR Vocabulary (Terminological Dictionary)
• Defines what the business is, using: • Noun concepts: concepts of things in or relevant to the business • Verb concepts: relationships between things • Definitional business rules: constraints on relationships and roles of things
• Enterprise-wide view: • Concepts have to be consistently understood across the entire business (especially if
different terms are used) • Business owners/authors:
In the 1960s, Charles Bachman introduced logical data structure diagrams to aid database design
IT people and business users began to understand each other a whole lot better
Data modelers started to use business terms on their diagrams and to discuss requirements in those terms
I can understand
him!
Interest Rate Observable
OTC Interest Rate Option
Interest Rate Swap Contract
Rate Treatment
is underlying
has has
M N
1
Index Tenor
Chen Entity-Relationship Model
By 1976, Peter Chen had developed methodology for entity-relationship logical data modeling
The problem? • A logical data model isn’t a model of the business:
• It’s a model of the data needed to support the business • Its vocabulary (although it uses familiar business terms) isn’t a
business vocabulary: • It’s the vocabulary of the data
• The model and the vocabulary are controlled by the modeler, whose focus is often on getting an IS specification that: • Complies with the standards (UML, XML, Xpath ...) built into the
modeling tools • Will be implementable with available technology
• As the data specification becomes more detailed: • Business users understand less of the “nuts and bolts” ... ... but the familiar-seeming vocabulary lulls them into expectations ... that turn out not to be satisfied by the systems delivered
Data modeling tools can support the model diagram with definitions of each element (class, property, association, etc. These definitions are usually developed element by element in informal text with hyperlinks between named elements.
If you start out by defining a data model, you can create these definitions But if you have already developed a business vocabulary in SBVR ...
Class 1 Definition: xxxxxxxxxxxxx Ref Scheme: Attr 1
Attr 1 Definition: xxxx that xxxxxxxx
Attr 1 references Class 1 Attr 2 Definition: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Class 1 has Attr 2 Class 1A Definition: Class1 that xxxx xxxxx
Class 1B connects Class 2 Definition: the Class1B xxx ...
Necessity: Each Class1B connects exactly two Class 2s
Necessity: Each Class 2 is connected by at most one Class 1B
Class 2 Definition: xxxx that xxxxxxxxxxxx
Etc ...
SBVR Vocabulary already provides definitions
SBVR Vocabulary and Data Model (4) • A business’s SBVR vocabulary provides definitions that are:
• More formal than those typically developed in data modeling tools • In the business language of the users
• The SBVR definitions are elements of a coherent business model – the SBVR vocabulary: • They are not written piecemeal to support data model elements
• The SBVR vocabulary drives development: • First, the users write what they mean • Then, the IS modelers transform it into IS models (in practice there is to-and-fro development – but business intent
should drive the process)
• The transformation is usually straightforward, but requires decisions on how business concepts will be modeled in data. • SBVR concepts might be modeled (in a data model) as classes,
attributes, values, states ... • Some will probably belong in documentation model
A self-defeating optimization • There is an approach that avoids a transformation
from SBVR vocabulary to data model: • constrain the business vocabulary to be only what will be in
a data model: i.e. develop a logical data model but document it in SBVR
Structured English. • Why is this not a good idea?
• It simply perpetuates (with a different notation) what we have been doing for the past 40 years – and getting wrong with depressing frequency
• There are standards much better than SBVR for data modeling – more mature, with immeasurably more practitioner experience and a much wider range of tools – in UML, XML and Xpath
• SBVR is best used for its intended purpose: defining businesses by means of vocabulary and rules.
For a discussion of these Use Cases see “SBVR: What is Now Possible and Why?”: http://www.businesssemantics.com/BusinessSemanticsLtd/SBVR-WhatIsNowPossibleAndWhy.pdf