An activity is something that one or more roles do.

In the UMA , an activity is a breakdown element which supports the nesting and logical grouping of related process elements such as descriptor and sub-activities, thus forming breakdown structures.

An artifact can have multiple forms including a model, a model element, or a document.

A UMA construct that specifies a process as the hierarchical composition of breakdown elements.

System designed to modify and manage business logic independently from the enterprise application.  BRMS provides a way to automate decision making and execute precisely on business policy. Consequently, policies and decisions form the core of all business processes and activities. A BRMS product should include facilities to enable:

• Full life-cycle maintenance of business rules by business analysts and developers
• Assured consistency by representing business knowledge uniformly with centralized control
• Facilities for testing, scenario generation, and impact analysis

BRMS is a method and means to treat rules as a true corporate asset.

Trigger for the execution of a business process. The processing of a business event can be done manually or using a software. Some decisions need to be done on the event to accept/ reject it or initiate other sub processes. Those decisions can be implemented using a rule engine technology.

The following list gives some examples of business event:

• Claim is received
• Tax form is filled
• Loan application is received
• Wafer is received in the Fab
• 
  

Representation of the core concepts of a business and their logical connections. The business object model is the basis for the vocabulary used in business rules. The elements of a business object model map to those of a corresponding execution domain object model. It can be seen as a view of the java or XSD model used for the rest of the application.

Formal declarative statement that describes the way business people wnat their business to operate. Express in natural language it models part of a business policy, it is specified unambiguously, and it can be implemented in a computer system. A business rule is written in a business rule language, in the form of a statement made of conditions and actions that execute only if the objects treated match the conditions. Business rules are packaged into a ruleset before they can be executed by a rule engine.

There are historically multiple definitions of a business rules. For reference purpose we can list:

• OMG - 1992 - Analysis and Design Reference Model : "Business rules are declarations of policies or conditions that must be satisfied". This definition is too restrictive as business rules includes guidelines.
• Guide - 1995 - business Rules Project - "Business rule is a statment that defines or constraints some aspect of the business.
• Business Modeling with UML 2000 - "A statement that can control or affect both the execution of a business process as well as the structure of the resources in the business"

Below are some examples of business rules:

• The claim must be issued before the expiration date of the policy.

• The claim date of loss should be before the expiration date of the policy end after the effective date.

• If the customer is eligible for a loan then continue the processing

• If the Bank Account Number is not valid refuse the operation
• If Tax Return Secondary Taxpayer is not assigned SSN, then EITC Eligible Tax Return is False
  
  

A special process that describes a reusable cluster of activity. Capability patterns express and communicate process knowledge for a key area of interest such as a discipline and can be directly used by practitioners to guide their work.

"Extra" statements added to source code for the purposes of testing, debugging, tuning, or tracing.

An encapsulated part of the system that is nontrivial, nearly independent, and replaceable and that fulfils a clear function in the context of well-defined architecture. A component conforms to and provides the realization of a set of interfaces.

Groups together all rules that determine one decision. It can be found in a use case description or in a Business Process Map for example. During the inception phase, the project team can build a decision point table to log the potential decision points which need to be managed during the Rule Discovery.

Example:

• Group all rules that determine 'eligibility for membership'
  

Software component that encapsulates run-time rule processing elements. The component instances provide a "ready to run" business rule application. A rule service component is stateless and simplifies the process of integrating business rules with popular application platforms such as J2SE, JEE, and a Web service. In the context of a BRMS application it is also named rule service.

Spreadsheet like, or table view for a set of business rules, where a rule is represented by a row in the table. The rows and columns identify all situations that require a business decision, and specify which action to take in each of these situations.

Here is an example of decision table based on a car rental example which verifies for each USA state if the age of the rental customer is in possible range. 

Tree view for a set of business rules, where a rule is represented by a path through the tree. Decision trees are composed of branches that have a condition node as their root, and end with actions. Decision trees allow you to manage a large set of rules with some conditions in common but not all.

(1)An area of knowledge or activity characterized by a family of related values.

(2) A specific problem category that is characterized by a body of knowledge, activities, and behaviors.

(3)A refineable hierarchy that groups related work products. 

Indicates how long it will take the team member(s) assigned to the work item to do the work. Typically uses the units of actual days or actual hours.

Facts are combinations of terms that describe what business people know about their business. It connects terms into sensible business relevant observations. Facts may describe the relationships between terms, like an Insurance Policy is a form of Contract, or it may describe the interactions between terms (collaboration).

Here are some examples of facts

• A coverage is the amount of protection against loss.
• A Deductible is the amount the Insured must pay when a loss occurs.
• A user must be part of a group, and the group includes the set of permissions the user can use.
• A taxpayer files a tax return form.
• A insured enters a claim in the system.
• A customer could have only one purchase order at a time
  
  

Guidance describes proven advice for accomplishing a goal. 

In the UMA, guidance generalizes all forms of content whose primary purpose is to provide explanations about other UMA elements. Guidance being itself a content element, it is possible to associate guidance to other guidance.

Third important project milestone that happens at the end of Construction phase. At this point, the product should be ready to be handed over to the transition team.

Second important project milestone that happens at the end of Construction phase. At this point, a baseline of requirements has been agreed to, detailed system objectives and scope have been defined, architecture should be baselined, and major risks resolved.

Describes generic UMA methodological concepts and guidance which provide step-by-step explanations, describing how specific goals are achieved independently of the placement of these steps within a process lifecycle. UMA separates method content from its application in process.

The point at which an iteration or phase formally ends, thus providing a check-point for whether the project is ready to move to the next iteration or phase.

A model is an abstraction of a more complicated thing.

Primarily describes intangible work products that are a result or state. An outcome can also be used to represent an informal work product.

(1) A general structure for particular types of development projects. Processes take content elements and relate them into semi-ordered sequences that are customized to specific types of projects. Thus, a process is a set of partially ordered work descriptions intended to reach a higher development goal, such as the release of a specific software  These work descriptions are organized into a hierarchical breakdown-structure A process focuses on the lifecycle and the sequencing of work in breakdown structures.

(2) The part of  UMA that models processes.

1. A capability needed by the user to solve a problem [in order to] to achieve an objective.
2. A capability that must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed documentation [THA00].
   

Software component used to execute business rule. The rule engine uses two major entities:

• a Rule Set: The set of rules that are processed by the rule engine, and rule execution flow information.
• an object set: The set of objects to be treated by rules.

A rule engine is executing a cycle consisting of three action states: match rules, select rules, and execute rules until there is no more rule to execute.

The rule engine evaluates the conditions of rules in the ruleset against the objects to determine (match) which rules are eligible to be executed. During execution, the engine collects all eligible rules in an “agenda”.

The object set is referenced in the engine’s working memory, which also contains the current state of the objects which lead to the current rules in the agenda.

All objects are examined by all rules. The effects of the execution are to create new data, or to modify existing ones.
The agenda  is a logical workspace where rule instances that have conditions matching objects in the working memory are put. There can be several rule instances for the same rule. When all the candidate rule are match the engine turns to the agenda for rule execution

One execution mode is the RetePlus algorithm used to match many patterns with many objects, it helps to minimize the number of rules and conditions that need to be evaluated, compute which rules should be executed, and identify in which order these rules should be fired.

Rules engine is  designed to be complete, and ensure that the effects of one rule execution (or firing) is propagated so that everything that can be inferred  is done in one run.

Governance is about operating the business well, and includes being able to demonstrate that you do what you say you do, and being able to explain why you do what you do the way that you are doing it.

Rule Governance is covering the processes to manage rule using a BRMS.

Various states the rule will have during its life cycle, from creation, testing, in production to retirement. A rule life cycle is linked to the development practices of the IT team and also to some business requirements. 

Type of project in which you can manage and organize rule artifacts, classpath, parameters and domain object models. A rule project needs to reference a java project, jar file, xml schema or web service as execution object model. A rule project represents one rule set but can have multiple rule flows (one needs to be set as the master (see its properties)).

A rule property is an attribute attached to a rule or package, defined as a name-value pair in the external properties file .

Central place where business rules and information about their execution are kept and maintained in an organized way. A repository contains one or more projects. You can save a repository in a file system or in a database.

A Rule Set is a group of rules that is executed as an aggregate entity. This term also refers to the object that is created when a ruleset file is parsed to instantiate an engine. In the context of ILOG JRules a Rule Set defines the set of rule artifacts executed by the  rule engine. Rule artifacts include all of the elements from a rule project that you can put into a Rule Set.

Oriented graph composed of rule tasks nodes and decision nodes, which is used to control and order the execution of rule artifacts. It can be created graphically using the Ruleflow Editor.

A ruleflow can be seen as a business process, but it is not a complete one. When designing a business process type of application is quite often that some sub flow of the business process model will be mapped to a ruleflow. But a rule flow is for the execution logic of the rule set.

Term references a business concept used in daily business operations. It can be one or more words, nouns. They are often found in different departments or refer to the same business concept from a different perspective: they are synonyms. A term may describe business concept which will be mapped to a Class, a characteristic of a business entity which will be mapped to attribute of a class, and sometime a tem may describe the way a business object behave, in that last case it will be mapped within method or final state machine.

Examples:

• Taxpayer, taxpayer obligation, loan, claim, legal entity, etc.

The specification of a set of test inputs, execution conditions, and expected results, which need to be validated to enable an assessment of some particular aspects of the system under test.

A guidance type for externally published papers that can be read and understood in isolation of other content elements and guidance.