Legality and Business Rules
How does legality work with business rules?
To say that differently how should an intelligent tool work so as to help you establish the business regimen you want to follow where legality is involved?
Consider the example of Same-Sex Marriage. Let’s suppose you want to make it illegal.
SBVR[1] does not have an innate concept/approach for “legality” in the sense of MWUD[2] 1: attachment to or observance of law. So if you wanted “is legal” in the most direct sense, you must define a unary verb concept for the concept Same-Sex Marriage.
In a looser sense, if you are in an organization (business) with the standing to define business rules, you could do several things, as follows. (I’ll make up a bit of vocabulary here.)
1. Specify a behavioral rule
A behavioral rule is one that can be potentially violated by people or organizations. The relevant rule might be expressed as follows:
The people united in a marriage must not be of the same gender.
Then you would decide how strictly you want to enforce the rule. Options range from strictly enforced to guideline. The rule would be active when a relevant state of affairs arose (i.e., specific people get married). 2. Define several definitional rules A definitional rule is one that cannot be violated; it exists to ensure the consistency of the concept system you chose to follow. Relevant definitional rules might be expressed as follows:- The people united in a marriage are not to be of the same gender.
- The people united in a same-sex marriage are to be of the same gender.
- Marriage: the uniting of people of different genders in wedlock
- Same-Sex Marriage: the uniting of people of the same gender in wedlock
Tags: behavioral rules, behavioral rules vs. definitional rules, business vocabulary, concept, concept analysis, definitional rule, definitions, SBVR, semantics, vocabulary, vocabulary and rules
Ronald G. Ross
Ron Ross, Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rules Solutions, LLC, is internationally acknowledged as the “father of business rules.” Recognizing early on the importance of independently managed business rules for business operations and architecture, he has pioneered innovative techniques and standards since the mid-1980s. He wrote the industry’s first book on business rules in 1994.