Online Proceedings Now Available

The RELAW 2012 proceedings were published by the IEEE Computer Society:

• See IEEE Xplore
• See DBLP

Workshop Overview

Compliance under Uncertainty

The objective of the RELAW workshop is to foster the discussion related to requirements engineering triggered by any legal regulation or law. The theme this year is Compliance under Uncertainty.

Over the past several decades, we have experienced tremendous growth in new infrastructure, business practices, products and services that use information to achieve stakeholder goals. Recent compliance challenges include balancing privacy and security, patient medical records, corporate governance, and different sources of uncertainty such as evolving regulations, technologies, and societies. To address similar challenges, this growth has drawn the attention of regulators, lawyers, engineers and academics in a shared pursuit to understand the historical and social impact of existing laws and regulations on emerging technology. The costs to brand, to infrastructure and to the public of violating the law are often prohibitive and the challenges to ensure that (software) systems comply with the law are viewed differently by those involved.

The fifth RELAW workshop is a multi-disciplinary, one-day workshop that will bring together practitioners and researchers from two domains: Requirements Engineering and Law. Participants from government, industry and academic sectors investigate challenges to ensure that information systems comply with policies and laws. The workshop will probe important issues, including the processes for identifying relevant policies, laws and jurisdictions, aligning laws with system requirements, managing requirements and changes in the law and demonstrating how systems comply with relevant laws through evidence-based mechanisms such as documentation, testing and certification, even in the presence of uncertainty. RELAW will include a track with requirements engineering research and industry papers and an invited talk from a law scholar to address emerging IT challenges in today’s regulatory environment.

Attendance, Format and Outcomes

The workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from auditing, accounting, law, software and requirements engineering. This workshop is open to the public. The workshop format will consist of presentations of papers and breakout sessions. The goals of this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Identifying and managing sources of uncertainty in legal compliance;
• Standardizing vocabulary, terms and modeling concepts from multiple disciplines;
• Refining objectives and identifying unsolved industry and research problems; and
• Finding agreement on validation objectives for proposed solutions.