AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

Ampersand is a method that uses relation algebra to capture business rules and to generate functional specifications of IT systems, which satisfy these rules. A business rule is defined as a formal representation of a business requirement. This thesis examines the feasibility of Ampersand to specify legal compliant requirements for business processes with use of the Hohfeldian legal concepts. These legal concepts derive the core legal norms from legal texts, which people, organization comply with. Another point of attention is to cope with exceptions in legal texts, pre-conditions in legal texts and traceability of legal texts. The results of the empirical study show that it is possible to specify requirements for business processes with the Ampersand language in a way that relations between actors in a business process, their tasks (actions) and the legal consequences of performing or not performing tasks are clear. The implementation consists of a part that serves as a database of legal norms. For establishing a link between legal statement and formal representation, the identification of the legal article is stored as population of the concepts. This makes it possible to include the source of the legal statement in reasoning with cross-references.