Awad et al.: An Iterative Approach to Synthesize Business Process Templates from Compliance Rules

Professor Dr. Ahmed Awad of Cairo University Faculty of Computers and Information, and colleagues, have published An iterative approach to synthesize business process templates from compliance rules [paywalled version ; preprint version] forthcoming in Information Systems, 37(8), 714–736 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

Companies have to adhere to compliance requirements. The compliance analysis of business operations is typically a joint effort of business experts and compliance experts. Those experts need to create a common understanding of business processes to effectively conduct compliance management. In this paper, we present a technique that aims at supporting this process. We argue that process templates generated out of compliance requirements provide a basis for negotiation among business and compliance experts. We introduce a semi-automated and iterative approach to the synthesis of such process templates from compliance requirements expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). We show how generic constraints related to business process execution are incorporated and present criteria that point at underspecification. Further, we outline how such underspecification may be resolved to iteratively build up a complete specification. For the synthesis, we leverage existing work on process mining and process restructuring. However, our approach is not limited to the control-flow perspective, but also considers direct and indirect data-flow dependencies. Finally, we elaborate on the application of the derived process templates and present an implementation of our approach.

Sapkota et al. on RP-Match: A Framework for Automatic Mapping of Regulations

Krishna Sapkota of Oxford Brookes University Department of Computing and Communication Technologies, and colleagues, have posted RP-Match: A Framework for Automatic Mapping of Regulations with Organizational Processes, under review at Semantic Web Journal.

Here is the abstract:

Mapping organizational processes with applicable regulatory guidelines is an important step in Regulatory Compliance Management. Automation in the mapping process helps in automation of the overall compliance process. Although there are several approaches which compute mapping between different entities such as ontology mapping, sentence similarity, semantic similarity and regulation-requirement mapping; it still requires a framework to automate the mapping process between regulation and processes. In this paper, we present RP-Match framework, which exploits the state of art tools for similarity measures and proposes cascading-priority algorithm for the regulation-process similarity computation. The framework also avails from the structures of the regulation ontology and organizational process ontology for the similarity measure. An initial case study carried out in the Pharmaceutical industry has shown an encouraging result.

Boer and van Engers: Wetsanalyse met ontologieën en regels

Dr. Alexander Boer and Professor Dr. Tom van Engers have posted Wetsanalyse met ontologieën en regels, slides of a presentation given at the workshop Wetsanalyse met ontologie en regels, held in Spring 2012 at the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The presentation covers rules, norms, policy making, argumentation, the application of legal rules, and the analysis of non-compliance with law.

JURIX 2011: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2011: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 14-16 December 2011, at the University of Vienna Centre for Legal Informatics, in Vienna, Austria.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 5 September 2011 — has been issued for JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 14-16 December 2011 at the University of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Henry Prakken.

Call for Papers: Computational Law Workshop: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 20 April 2011 — has been issued for Computational Law Workshop: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, to be held 6 June 2011, at The University of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The workshop is being held in conjunction with ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Papers for the workshop are invited on the following topics:

• Contract and Regulations as a basis for coordination of cross-organisational interactions
• System theoretic point of view Formalisms for expressing contracts and Regulations
• Contract description languages for Contract negotiation and validation
• Standards for capturing rules in contracts and regulations (e.g. RIF, Legal RuleML, LKIF, SBVR, etc):
• Run-time contract monitoring and enforcement Standardisation
• Systems Contract management requirements for specific contracts,
• Standards/initiatives (e.g. Web Services, BPEL4WS, WS-CDL, tc)
• Links between contracts, regulations, business processes and business services
• Practical experience with contract and regulations management systems Role

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani.

Legal Informatics Papers from CAiSE ’09

Two legal informatics papers presented at the 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems (CAiSE ’09), held June 8-12, 2009 in Amsterdam, have been published in volume 453 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org):

• Motoshi Saeki, Haruhiko Kaiya, & Satoshi Hattori, Applying a Model Checker to Check Regulatory Compliance of Use Case Models; and
• Brigitte Burgemeestre et al., Early Requirements Engineering for e-Customs Decision Support: Assessing Overlap in Mental Models.

RuleML 2009: Registration Open

Registration is now open for RuleML 2009: The Third International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications, to be held November 5-7, 2009, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The theme of the conference is “applications of Web rule technologies for business and information systems.” Program topics include the following:

• Rule Transformation and Extraction;
• Rules and Uncertainty;
• Rules and Norms;
• Rule-based Game AI;
• Rule-based Event Processing and Reaction Rules;
• Rules and Cross Industry Standards; and
• General Rule Topics, including:
• Rules and ontologies;
• Rule-based reasoning with non-monotonic negation, modalities, deontic, temporal, priority, scoped or other rule qualification;
• Rule-based default reasoning with default logic, defeasible logic, and answer set programming; and
• Rules in Semantic Web Technologies.

The conference will also feature the RuleML-2009 Challenge, featuring benchmarks and case studies of rule engines, translators, and other applications.

According to IAAIL, a registration discount is available to IAAIL members.

For more information, see the topics page or the main conference Website.

HT IAAIL Website.