SBVR is an abbreviation for Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules, and is one of the Object Management Group (OMG) standards. It is focused specifically at the level of business modeling for your organization’s (or even industry’s) business vocabulary and rules (e.g., next to a BPMN initiative focused at your business processes).

As a standard, you should not consider it as an alternative to well known modeling notations (e.g., UML is one of the notations for SBVR modeling). Rather it is a conceptual framework of concepts that you have to deal with when you are working on a semantic layer (which is unavoidably a foundation for your data governance). Examples of such concepts: the business unit that owns or uses a certain term (= speech community), shared vocabularies across the entire organization (that you can incorporate), the distinction between a term and its meaning (i.e., “Client” and “Customer” as possible representations for the same concept, or synonyms), taxonomy, multiple rulesets applied on the same vocabulary, …

The SBVR standard is the only thing out there that can really help you in dealing with the complexity of the problem. It recognizes the fact that different communities (e.g., business units, geographical divisions, lines of business, backoffice, frontoffice, …) do use different ways of describing things – although they might actually mean the same thing. Doing anything in a narrower scope that the SBVR metamodel advises you to do will at a certain point in time put you at a dead end…

Concerning links, intro information can be found on the wikipedia page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SBVR ), the full details are of course available in the specification itself ( http://www.omg.org/spec/SBVR/1.0/ ) and I find that Mr. Hall’s presentation gives you something to help you understand SBVR ( http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/ThinkTank/past-events/2006/presentations/04-WS1-2_Hall.pdf ).

Hope this helps.