The International Business Communication Standards (IBCS) are practical proposals for designing business communication, available for free use under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA). IBCS are used to optimize reports, presentations, and dashboards in terms of their conceptual design, visual perception, and semantic notation. The IBCS proposals formed the basis of the "ISO/AWI 24896 Standard notation for business reports" project, launched in July 2024.
Business communication meets IBCS standards if it adheres to the rules of the following three pillars:
IBCS Notation is the term for the semantic rules of IBCS. IBCS Notation governs the standardization of terminology (e.g., terms, abbreviations, and number formats), descriptive texts (e.g., messages, titles, legends, and labels), dimensions (e.g., metrics, scenarios, and time periods), analyses (e.g., variance analyses and time series analyses), and indicators (e.g., symbols for highlights or scaling).
The IBCS Association continues to review and develop the International Business Communication Standards. [6] As a non-profit organization, it publishes the standards for free use and ensures detailed consultation and discussion before releasing new versions. This includes a global effort to seek public input. The IBCS standards, version 1.0, were unanimously recommended for publication by active members at the general assembly on June 18, 2015, in Amsterdam. Version 1.1 was released in 2017, and version 1.2 in 2021. As of June 2024, the IBCS Association has 12,384 members from 139 countries. Rolf Hichert is the president of the IBCS Association.
The IBCS Institute, founded in 2004, serves as the host, training institute, and certification authority of the IBCS Creative Commons project. Its roots date back to the 1980s when Rolf Hichert consulted for McKinsey & Company, where he met Gene Zelazny and other pioneers in the conceptual and visual design of reports and presentations. Since 2020, the IBCS Institute has been led by Jürgen Faisst. Since July 2024, Edyta Szarska has been the second managing partner.
In July 2024, the new project "ISO/AWI 24896 Standard notation for business reports" was registered in Technical Committee ISO/TC 37. Experts from 12 countries are working on developing a standard notation for business reports. The draft presented by an ISO/TC 37 working group as part of the project application is based on proposals from the IBCS Association.
The International Organization for Standardization is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Article 3 of the ISO Statutes.
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A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be composed of a number of other elements which, in turn, represent the color and size of the car and define its owner.
Edward Rolf Tufte, sometimes known as "ET", is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.
Mathematical notation consists of using symbols for representing operations, unspecified numbers, relations, and any other mathematical objects and assembling them into expressions and formulas. Mathematical notation is widely used in mathematics, science, and engineering for representing complex concepts and properties in a concise, unambiguous, and accurate way.
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A modeling language is any artificial language that can be used to express data, information or knowledge or systems in a structure that is defined by a consistent set of rules. The rules are used for interpretation of the meaning of components in the structure of a programming language.
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Data modeling in software engineering is the process of creating a data model for an information system by applying certain formal techniques. It may be applied as part of broader Model-driven engineering (MDE) concept.
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Business process modeling (BPM) is the action of capturing and representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current business processes may be analyzed, applied securely and consistently, improved, and automated.
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Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model.
Integration DEFinition for information modeling (IDEF1X) is a data modeling language for the development of semantic data models. IDEF1X is used to produce a graphical information model which represents the structure and semantics of information within an environment or system.
Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of the Semantic Web family of standards built upon RDF and RDFS, and its main objective is to enable easy publication and use of such vocabularies as linked data.
The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a business. SBVR is intended to formalize complex compliance rules, such as operational rules for an enterprise, security policy, standard compliance, or regulatory compliance rules. Such formal vocabularies and rules can be interpreted and used by computer systems. SBVR is an integral part of the OMG's model-driven architecture (MDA).
In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties and relations between the concepts, data and entities of a given domain of interest. In a broader sense, this field also includes a knowledge construction of the domain using formal ontology representations such as OWL/RDF. A large-scale representation of abstract concepts such as actions, time, physical objects and beliefs would be an example of ontological engineering. Ontology engineering is one of the areas of applied ontology, and can be seen as an application of philosophical ontology. Core ideas and objectives of ontology engineering are also central in conceptual modeling.
Ontology engineering aims at making explicit the knowledge contained within software applications, and within enterprises and business procedures for a particular domain. Ontology engineering offers a direction towards solving the inter-operability problems brought about by semantic obstacles, i.e. the obstacles related to the definitions of business terms and software classes. Ontology engineering is a set of tasks related to the development of ontologies for a particular domain.
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In the context of information retrieval, a thesaurus is a form of controlled vocabulary that seeks to dictate semantic manifestations of metadata in the indexing of content objects. A thesaurus serves to minimise semantic ambiguity by ensuring uniformity and consistency in the storage and retrieval of the manifestations of content objects. ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005 defines a content object as "any item that is to be described for inclusion in an information retrieval system, website, or other source of information". The thesaurus aids the assignment of preferred terms to convey semantic metadata associated with the content object.
Willard Cope Brinton was an American consulting engineer, president of Brinton Associates, and information visualisation pioneer, particularly known for publication of the 1914 textbook on graphic methods, entitled Graphic methods for presenting facts.