Autonomous Business Capability Specification
ABCS is the normative specification of the Autonomous Business Standard project. It defines canonical business meaning independently of application vendors and implementation technology.
1. Normative scope
Capability is the universal executable primitive. Domains classify capabilities into enduring areas of business responsibility. Business Objects define the canonical business information capabilities act upon, consume or produce.
If not, it is outside ABCS. Integration infrastructure, automation infrastructure, middleware and generic technical IT operations are not ABCS business domains.
2. Business domains and maturity
Draft 0.2 establishes procurement, finance, sales, hr, service, logistics, manufacturing, and projects. Procurement is the Reference domain; the other seven are Modeled. Maturity describes specification completeness, not adoption.
Explore the Business Catalog →
3. Canonical identifiers
Capability: <domain>.<business-subject>.<operation> Business Object: <domain>.<business-object> procurement.purchase-order.submit finance.payment.approve service.customer-case.resolve logistics.shipment.dispatch manufacturing.work-order.release projects.project-time.approve
4. Business Objects and schemas
A Business Object is a supporting canonical semantic contract, not an execution primitive. Definitions specify useful business fields, keys, relationships and state without embedding application-vendor representation.
Business Object model →
Browse and download canonical schemas →
5. Parties and roles
Party is a reusable business-participant concept. Supplier, Customer, Buyer, Seller, Payer, Payee, Carrier, Worker, Sponsor and similar terms may be contextual roles or domain relationships.
6. Supporting semantics
Processes, Policies, Events, Roles and Relationships support capability meaning but are not peer executable primitives. If a process must be externally performed, expose a Capability whose identity describes the business action rather than the implementation mechanism.
7. Business scheduling
hr.payroll-run.schedule and finance.payment-run.schedule are valid because scheduling those business runs has independent business meaning. Scheduling a cron job, container job, middleware task or generic batch executable is outside ABCS.
8. Discovery and invocation
ABCS defines transport-neutral Discover, Describe and Invoke semantics and a small Capability Invocation Envelope. An optional HTTP binding may use GET /capabilities, GET /capabilities/{id} and POST /capabilities.
9. Representation and validation
ABCS maintains one logical machine-readable model rather than separate YAML and JSON semantics. Modular definitions are authored in JSON-compatible YAML 1.2. JSON is the preferred machine publication/interchange representation. JSON Schema 2020-12 is the normative validation language.
The aggregate Draft 0.2 Business Catalog is published in both YAML and JSON. A mismatch between generated JSON and maintained YAML is a publication defect.
10. Provenance
ABCS follows a GREEN-only provenance policy. External sources are used only when sufficiently open for the intended use and are recorded transparently. Open semantic references are used for cross-checking rather than copied wholesale.
11. Compatibility and conformance
Canonical identifiers preserve their established business meaning. An implementation conforms to an ABCS capability when it declares the canonical identifier, preserves the defined business semantics, satisfies applicable canonical contracts, and clearly exposes limitations that affect those semantics.
12. Reference and implementations
The separate Autonomous Business Reference project is non-normative and demonstrates one lightweight implementation. Sirvisetti Autonomy is a larger production-grade commercial implementation. Neither defines ABCS.