Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) in Requirements Engineering (RE) and/or Software Product Management (SPM):

SBVR is a new OMG knowledge standard that utilises carefully selected natural language elements to describe business processes and structured knowledge based on first-order logic.The Wikipedia article on SBVR provides extensive background information. "SBVR is a landmark for the OMG, the first OMG specification to incorporate the formal use of natural language in modeling and the first to provide explicitly a model of formal logic. Based on a fusion of linguistics, logic, and computer science, and two years in preparation, SBVR provides a way to capture specifications in natural language and represent them in formal logic so they can be machine-processed."

In your research you will analyse this novel technology, compare its key strengths and weaknesses with competitive formalisms, and/or inspect the current (plans for) adoption state.

Alternatively, you could focus on programs outside the OMG which are also adopting SBVR. For example, the Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE), an integrated project of the European Commission Framework Programme 6, has adopted SBVR as the basis for its Business Modeling Language. Also, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is assessing SBVR for use in the Semantic Web, through the bridge provided by ODM. So, SBVR and the Semantic web?

Type: to be discussed
Contact: Marco
Source: http://m.spru.it/edu/theses/open
Requirements: affinity with language, logic, specifications