SBVR, RuleSpeak & the CMCC — When Business Rules Stop Talking and Simply Are
1 · Cold‑Open Hook
2 : 14 a.m. A payments platform lies dark because one flag — Preferred Billing Account ≠ TRUE — slipped past the parser. The rule “Every active customer shall have a preferred billing account” was written, reviewed, approved… and then silently mis‑parsed by the overnight deploy script. The outage cost $180 K and three engineers’ sleep cycles. What if a rule could never be mis‑parsed — because there was nothing to parse in the first place?
2 · Executive Snapshot
- SBVR + RuleSpeak let analysts declare what must be true in structured English, independent of code.
- CMCC claims the same declarative power with five data‑model primitives — no language layer at all.
- Why now ? Low‑code explosions, data‑mesh governance, and AI policy all crave machine‑verifiable truth.
- What’s at stake ? Fewer translation errors, self‑validating data models, and an audit trail that is the runtime.
- Should you care ? If your rules ever cross the requirements/implementation chasm, yes.
3 · Primer — SBVR & RuleSpeak in One Breath
SBVR isolates meaning from mechanics: terms, fact types, and modalities live in a vocabulary that machines and humans share. RuleSpeak gives that vocabulary a readable façade — “It is obligatory that each invoice has exactly one buyer.” Cardinality, modality, and noun concepts travel intact from whiteboard to rule engine. But behind the curtain, a parser still translates prose into constraints.
4 · Cracks in the Wall
- Ambiguity: “shall” vs. “must” vs. “is required to” — do they map to the same modality?
- Internationalisation: one rule, seven languages, endless synonyms.
- Toolchain drag: authoring → parsing → code‑gen → DB migration → runtime triggers. Every hop invites drift.
5 · The CMCC Landing
The Conceptual Model Completeness Conjecture says every computable business truth emerges from five primitives:
- Schema (S) — entities & fields.
- Data (D) — asserted records.
- Lookups (L) — pointers between entities.
- Aggregations (A) — totals & counts.
- Lambda Fields (F) — derived facts.
No grammar, no parser. Truth lives in structure: if a Rental.vehicleId is NOT NULL, the rule “Each rental must reference a vehicle” enforces itself.
6 · Side‑by‑Side Show‑and‑Tell
Example A — Referential Integrity
- RuleSpeak: Each rental must reference a vehicle.
- CMCC:
- S:
Rental.vehicleId (UUID) - L:
Rental.vehicleId → Vehicle.id (required) - Enforcement: model rejects any Rental without a vehicleId.
Example B — Conditional Obligation
- RuleSpeak: If the renter is under 25 years old, an under‑age surcharge applies.
- CMCC:
- S:
Customer.age (Number) - F:
underage_surcharge_applies = age < 25 - Enforcement: field evaluates to TRUE automatically; downstream pricing uses the flag.
Example C — Temporal Calculation
- RuleSpeak: A loyalty tier upgrade becomes effective the month after a customer earns 1 000 points.
- CMCC:
- S:
PointAward(date, points) - A:
points_this_month = SUM(points WHERE month == NOW()) - F:
tier_upgrade_date = FIRST_DAY_OF_NEXT_MONTH IF points_this_month ≥ 1000 - Enforcement: upgrade date materialises; no imperative code schedules it.
7 · Stress‑Test Interlude — Quantum Ethics Across 17 Planes
Consider a playful thought experiment: self‑replicating AIs balancing resources across parallel universes while keeping karmic equilibrium. Even that circus maps to CMCC:
- S:
AIEntity,Universe,KarmicAccount,TemporalState. - L:
AIEntity.currentUniverse → Universe.id. - A:
total_resource_usage_per_universe. - F:
is_action_allowed = (karmic_delta < τ) ∧ ¬creates_paradox. The structure balloons, but the primitives suffice—proof by absurdity that RuleSpeak’s modalities can descend into pure data.
8 · SBVR & CMCC: Better Together
CMCC doesn’t supplant SBVR/RuleSpeak — it gives it a lossless storage kernel.
- Round‑trip fidelity: Any CMCC model can be rendered as RuleSpeak sentences and regenerated with zero information loss.
- Tool‑chain amplification: Push a CMCC schema into an SBVR engine and every existing compliance, simulation, and documentation asset lights up automatically.
- Governance harmony: Human‑readable SBVR remains the policy surface; CMCC provides the deterministic, ACID runtime underneath.
- Shared DNA: Both insist on declarative truth and pre‑defined vocabulary; CMCC simply records those truths directly in data form.
Think of CMCC as the database to SBVR’s language — two sides of the same coin.
9 · Adoption Pathways
Greenfield: model with S‑D‑L‑A‑F first; auto‑generate RuleSpeak for docs.
Brownfield:
- Extract vocab & rules from existing SBVR assets.
- Translate structural rules to L‑A‑F artefacts.
- Keep RuleSpeak sentences as living commentary.
Tooling watch‑list: Airtable demo (next article), graph‑DB triggers, rule engines that expose lambda fields.
10 · Skeptic’s Corner
- Temporal logic is messy.
- Response: Versioned schemas + temporal snapshots keep S‑D‑L‑A‑F intact.
- Exception hierarchies explode field count.
- Response: Namespaces & composable lambdas mitigate sprawl.
- Meta‑rules about rules?
- Response: Treat rules as data; second‑order lambdas evaluate them.
11 · Future Work & Open Questions
- Can CMCC express legal defeasibility and precedence?
- How do we compress lambdas for machine‑learning scale domains?
- What governance patterns emerge when truth = data model?
12 · Take‑Away Capsule
Describe truth — do not script behaviour.
Structure first, prose second.
Five primitives can replace a thousand ‘ifs’.
SBVR taught us meaning without mechanics; CMCC stores that meaning in a language‑free substrate.
When rules become structure, enforcement is automatic.
13 · Appendix
Glossary
SBVR · RuleSpeak · CMCC · Primitives (S‑D‑L‑A‑F) · Modality · Lambda Field
Mapping Cheat‑Sheet
- Obligatory → required lookup or lambda returning TRUE/FALSE
- Permitted → lambda guard
can_X - Prohibited → inverse required condition
References & Further Reading
- Completeness: Codd to Turing, to Gödel, to… Me?
This is where I first laid out the CMCC — the idea that just five declarative primitives (Schema, Data, Lookups, Aggregations, Formulas) are enough to express any finite business rule. It’s both a tribute and a challenge to the giants whose shoulders we stand on. - Datomic — Time-Traveling Data, Immutable Semantics
A deep dive into how Datomic nails seven out of ten CMCC criteria — including time travel and immutable facts — and what’s still missing for a perfect score. If you’re looking for a real-world system that comes close to the ideal, start here. - MDE Monday #2: Live or Locked? Unifying Design-Time and Run-Time in One Model
One of the biggest frictions in semantic negotiation is the gap between what we design and what actually runs. This piece shows how CMCC collapses that gap — live rules, live snapshots, zero drift. - Prove Me Wrong: Every Idea in the Universe Melts into These 5 Primitives
I asked skeptical LLMs to break the five-primitives conjecture with the most bonkers rules they could invent. They failed. If you’re wondering how far this idea stretches, this is where we pressure-test its limits. - The Five-Piece Rulebook
A skeptical friend tried to poke holes in CMCC, but ended up modeling the absurd with it. This conversational piece breaks it down in lay terms — perfect for sharing with folks outside the data-nerd echo chamber.
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npm install ssotme/cli - Website: EffortlessAPI.com
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