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OASIS Universal Business Language standard. Not a far reaching standard, but probably more useful for small, resource-starved development projects.

From the standards document:

... The OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) is intended to help solve these problems by defining a generic XML interchange format for business documents that can be extended to meet the requirements of particular industries. Specifically, UBL 1.0 provides the following:

Updated Sept 17 2008: new links

One of the great contributions to the world of business rules in the last decade is the OMG Model Driven Architecture for Business Rules. The OMG link will take you to a page listing several formats for the article. I suggest using the PDF format for Business Semantics of Business Rules, it's about 240K. They also have MS Word and RTF formats.

Some more definitions from Haley. [  Note: Haley has a new set of definitions, not not those on this page.  I like the old set of definitions much more than the new ones ].

I left in Haley's product blurbs because I think they are largely true - their list of features can be used like a checklist for evaluating other rule engines.   Haley

From a Wikipedia discussion about Osterwalder, Pigneur and Tucci's definition of the term business model (sightly reformatted to make the nine "building blocks" more visible ):

The most classic and complete definition of business rules from the Business Rules Group ( blockquoted in toto, all rights gratefully acknowledged ).

Article 1. Primary Requirements, Not Secondary

1.1. Rules are a first-class citizen of the requirements world.
1.2. Rules are essential for, and a discrete part of, business models and technology models.

Note first that there is a big difference between The Semantic Web to A Semantic Web. In this version of the Semantic Web, knowledge shared by individuals. A web would be owned by its participants or subscribers rather the general public, something to be actively joined, perhaps more like the basic model of a Wiki than an openly accessible public site.

The Process View 

Haley has an interesting take on the definition of business rule.

Business rule :is a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. A business rule asserts business structure to control or influence the behavior of the business, i.e. a process or procedure.

That invaluable tool, the Wikipedia, has the cleanest and concise definition of the term 'business rule' I've encountered. The Wikipedia defines business rule as: