Process Modelling towards e‑Government — Visualisation and Semantic Modelling of Legal Regulations as Executable Process Sets

Abstract

The paper discusses the visualisation and formal modelling of a legally regulated process. The approach is motivated by a historic retrospective. The technical innovation is not only to consider the given law when developing business process models ‑ like many other approaches do ‑ but to explicitly derive a process structure which is implicitly specified within the paragraphs themselves. To translate paragraphs into process models the Semantic Process Language (SPL) is used, since it enables us to articulate language structures into executable workflow models. The paper illustrates its approach with a demonstration example which considers the obligation right of Switzerland. It selects those paragraphs which participate in the definition of a causal ordering. The presented approach provides means for verifying whether process‑like behaviour fulfils the selected paragraphs formally.