SBVR — Interchange issue

The Interchange discussion in chapters 13 and Annexes K and L appear to discuss exchange of meaning between tools. But what about representations and expressions? Presumably users would want to preserve their forms of expression when moving rules between tools. Is that a goal of the Interchange design? If the answer is yes, then tool implementors will need more detail about how to accomplish that.

Consider the first example in chapter 9, "A rental must have at most three additional drivers". I can think of several ways to associate the expression with the semantic formulation described in this chapter.

1. Use the fact type "statement is formalized by closed logical formulation" to associate the complete rule statement with the top-level semantic formulation.
2. Use the fact types "representation has expression", "representation represents meaning" and "closed semantic formulation formulates meaning" to associate the complete rule statement (as an expression) to a representation that then gets associated to a meaning that then gets associated with the semantic formulation. This seems like one too many levels of indirection: why isn't a semantic formulation a type of meaning?
3 . Decompose the statement into sub-statements such as "rental has at most three additional drivers" and "rental has additional drivers" and associate these individually with the corresponsing logical formulations that compose the complete formulation. That is, exchange the expression corresponding to each logical formulation.

Absent further guidance, tool vendors will choose different answers to such questions. That will defeat the goal of interoperability between tools and repositories.

Resolved by the resolution to Issue 9950.