Policy-Based Semantic Compliance Checking for Business Process Management

Compliance management, risk analysis, and auditing are disciplines that are critical for large scale distributed enterprise systems. The way these complex systems are developed and deployed makes the management and enforcement of enterprise goals or policies a hard task. This is also true for compliance management of business processes (BPs). Such an observation is emphasized if we give compliance management the scope of the whole enterprise model. In this paper we explain our approach to modeling compliance measures based on policies and present a framework for managing and enforcing compliance policies on enterprise models and BPs. We discuss our ideas in the context of a semantically-enabled environment and discuss why leveraging compliance checking to a semantic level enhances compliance management.