SBVR16 — No way to adopt a concept or a glossary item

SBVR provides for a speech community to adopt a definition, or an element of guidance, but no clear way for a vocabulary to adopt a term and its definition from another vocabulary. The Date Time Vocabulary (clause 4) formally adopts a set of terms from the SBVR specification with the intent that the term means the definition given in SBVR and has whatever other associations that term may have to other adopted SBVR terms. (This is the usual practice for adopted terminology in an ISO standard.) But SBVR does not provide a formal expression for this. Instead, it appears that DTV must introduce all the required SBVR terms and their definitions and then cite SBVR as the Source of the definitions. (This is a practice ISO recommends against, because of the problem of synchronization of changes.) We believe that this is a shortcoming in SBVR.