Connecting People: Semantic-Conceptual Modeling for Laws and Regulations

Working on building large scale information systems that have the job to serve their clients in a client friendly way and at the same time have to comply with the rules that regulate their behavior, including their (legal) decision-making processes, we observed that designing these systems is still more an art rather than a result of systematic engineering. We have been working on a method allowing stakeholders to systematically analyze the rules and their meaning (i.e. their effect in practical cases) in such way that it supports systems designers and (legal) experts in making sense out of the legal sources, and use this understanding of the regulatory system at hand when designing information systems that supports both the (administrative) organizations and their clients. In this paper we will elaborate on our proposed analysis approach, show how to systematically use the patterns explicitly but often implicitly available in laws and regulation. The Hohfeld conceptual model is very helpful. The Hohfeld model needs extension in our view and thus we have specified the semantic-conceptual model for Hohfeld as a solid base to add time travel aspects.