Stephen wrote "the only place to capture (document) business rules is through the requirements".
I should have emphasised that our integration of ReqPro and Softlaw's expert rulebase system is done exactly that way. We start with a legal document (hopefully in Word) and mark each clause as a ReqPro requirement. We decide if the clause needs to be modelled and record our decision using ReqPro attributes.
If the clause needs modelling, we translate it into a set of statements which may be evaluated to find out if the clause is met. For example, a clause 911B might be "a person who operates in this jurisdiction requires a licence unless ...".
We would create statements such as "clause 911B is satisfied", "the person operates in this jurisdiction", "the person requires a licence", "the person has a licence".
The statements are written into the source document, added to ReqPro as database requirements, and traced to the clause requirement. (They are ReqPro database requirements because they may be re-used in multiple locations in multiple source documents). The statements are also copied to the rulebase, which does some fancy English parsing to produce alternatives like "the person does not require a licence", "the person might require a licence", "does the person have a licence?".
The rules themselves are captured in the expert system, and can be viewed in English by lawyers, managers, etc, as follows
236: Clause 911B is satisfied if:
option 1:
70: The person operates in this jurisdiction; and
77: The person requires a licence; and
3313: The person has a licence;
~236: If this is not the case, then it will be concluded that clause 911B is not satisfied.
Some statements, such as "the person has a licence" cannot be determined from rules, but need to be captured in a database. We use ReqPro attributes to indicate which table it belongs to, and all the controls to position it in our data entry system, where it might appear as "do you have a licence?"
A nice outcome (which unexpectedly lopped three man months of work from the project) is that we could hyperlink each statement to every clause using it, by accessing the ReqPro traceability links. So the end-user can find out why we are asking that particular question, and all its legal contexts!
Cheers
Richard Brand
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Manager Business Systems
APIR Systems Pty Ltd
Unit 2/39 Jardine Street
Kingston ACT 2604
phone 61 2 6260 6035
fax 61 2 6260 6037
mobile 0418 568 358
