Cross-Corporate Business Rules Management as a Service

Companies are facing ever increasing regulation of their business by corporate directives and law. And most of these regulatory constraints are the same
for several companies. Hence not only "smarter" IT solutions for compliance controlling are required, but also cross-corporate approaches. Therefore, this
project aims at designing an architecture for cross-corporate management of business rules. This architecture is also implemented by a software prototype. The software prototype implements a cross-corporate business vocabulary and rule book. It allows online compliance checks and the automatic generation of business rules from natural language texts. The prototype is based on semantic web technology which allows to implement business rules as semantic queries on a defined knowledge base incorporating linked (reference) data.

The key elements of the architecture, besides a reference collaboration process architecture and a governance model, are:
1) Business rules management platform: A collaboration platform to define and manage business rules with standardized interfaces for business rules exchange.
2) Business rules repository: A business vocabulary and rule book where business rules and business objects are defined in a formalized but business understandable language. The repository provides the foundation for a shared understanding of business rules and, thus, for the exchange of rules.
3) Business rules translation engine: A tool for identifying and formalizing business rules from natural language texts (e.g. laws) and for translating the formalized rules into executable rules code.
4) Business rules engine: An online compliance checker for enterprise data: The rules engine implements the business rules from the business rules repository and and allows for online validation of provided data (e.g. accuracy of legal addresses or presence of business partners from black-listed countries) using big data technology and external reference data repositories.