Requirements and compliance in legal systems: a logic approach

Waël Hassan, University of Ottawa, wael@acm.org,
Luigi Logrippo, Université du Québec en Outaouais, luigi@uqo.ca

It is shown that the concepts of requirements and implementation exist in normative systems, in particular in law, and are similar to homologous concepts in software engineering. Concepts of compliance and conformance are also similar in the two areas. Further, it is shown how a logic analyzer such as Alloy can be used in order to verify legal compliance by checking consistency between legal and enterprise requirements. Examples are taken from privacy law and financial reporting law.

We propose a compliance and consistency validation method that represents and combines legal and enterprise requirements. The method uses ontologies for capturing enterprise definitions and first order logic to represent requirements. The method uses Alloy-4 analyser to detect violations that are consequence of lack of compliance and inconsistency.