Service Compliance: Towards Electronic Compliance Programs

“Compliance” is a multi-faceted concept that encompasses the capability of an organization to monitor and meet impinging obligations. It has recently become an area of significant concern to many major multi-national organizations. The proliferation of service-oriented systems rely on rich behavioral descriptions of functionality to facilitate seamless application composition and interoperation. These descriptions are subject to compliance with protocols (behavioral encoding) or business rules (state-based encoding). In addition, complete life-cycle support for dealing with compliance, which should cater for the specification, checking and change of policies and processes, is of crucial importance. In this article we explore the depth of generic compliance programs and provide an overview and agenda for “Service Compliance”, outlining some of the research challenges in this rapidly emerging area of research.