Supporting domain experts to select and configure precise compliance rules

Abstract

Compliance specifications concisely describe selected aspects of what a business operation should adhere to. To enable automated techniques for compliance checking, it is important that these requirements are specified correctly and precisely, describing exactly the behavior intended. Although there are rigorous mathematical formalisms for representing compliance rules, these are often perceived to be difficult to use for business users. Regardless of notation, however, there are often subtle but important details in compliance requirements that need to be considered. The main challenge in compliance checking is to bridge the gap between informal description and a precise specification of all requirements. In this paper, we present an approach which aims to facilitate creating and understanding formal compliance requirements by providing configurable templates that capture these details as options for commonly-required compliance requirements. These options are configured interactively with end-users, using question trees and natural language. The approach is implemented in the Process Mining Toolkit ProM. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.