Enhancing Law Modeling and Analysis: using BPR-Based and Goal-Oriented Frameworks

Legal documents contain regulations and principles at different levels of abstraction. They constitute rich sources of information for public administrations (PA) redesign and even- tually for the software delivery that must comply with normative regulations that are specified in laws and procedures. In order to facilitate the alignment between these elements, systematic methods and tools automating regulations modeling and analysis must be developed. In this paper, we propose the integration of process modeling (named VLPM) and goal-oriented (named No`mos) tool-supported methodologies to systematically model and analyze laws and procedures in public administration. We show that such integrated view would provide a framework that allows tracing and reasoning either top-down, from the principles to the implementation or, vice versa, bottom-up, from a change in the procedure to the principles. Finally, we also believe that this would provide a facility for interchanging models among different tools and for sharing models among different actors.Previously we proposed two complementary frameworks — the No`mos and VLPM frameworks— to systematically model and analyze laws. No`mos is a goal-oriented approach to effec- tively capture high-level principles in terms of goal realization for the requirements guided by the satisfiability of normative proposition(s) obtained from rules embedded in the law. VLPM, whereas is a tool-supported BPR methodology to extract laws represented in XML and build models using a subset of UML diagrams. In this paper, we provide detailed overview of the two frameworks and their integration whose aim is to improve the current modeling and analysis of laws by providing a uniform environment that can be used both at modeling time and for laws assessment. The integration of process and goal-oriented ontologies with the VLPM framework would also make easier the modeling and analysis of laws and procedures and provide a facility for interchanging models among the tools. We believe that, this provides a framework that allows tracing and reasoning either top-down, from the principles to the implementation or, vice versa, bottom-up, from a change in the procedure to the principles. It is exactly this connection that adds value to the solution we propose and makes our approach more significant than the simple juxtaposition of the two techniques. Finally, we use an example to examine the combined offer.