Against the stream

Why Most "Business Language" Artifacts Flow the Wrong Way

TL;DR — Most artifacts that claim to speak "business language" — DDD context maps, OWL ontologies, Gherkin scenarios, DSLs — are built from the technical side and traveled toward business readability. They flow against the current. Genuine business language originates from the natural sentences domain experts actually use, and is formalized from there toward technical implementation. The direction of derivation is not a detail. It determines whether a model is owned by the business or merely legible to it.

There is a seductive promise at the heart of Domain-Driven Design, the Semantic Web, and almost every modeling methodology that has emerged in the past decades. The promise is alignment — that we can build artifacts which speak the language of the business, and from which technical implementations will naturally follow. It is a good promise. It addresses a real problem. And it is, in most of its current forms, unfulfilled.

Not because the tools are bad. Not because the practitioners are careless. But because most of these artifacts flow in the wrong direction.

Read the full article on LinkedIn.