An Environment for the Joint Management of Written Policies and Business Rules

The contemporary world produces huge bodies of policies and regulations, while the underlying procedures tend to be automated in decision systems, which are designed to define, deploy, execute, monitor and maintain the various rules to which an organization or enterprise has to comply. It is important that the written documentation is integrated into such decision systems in order to refer to the texts to explain decisions, to update the systems when the policy evolves or, conversely, to amend the source documents if some of the rules happen to be inconsistent. The problem is that the complexity of information to be searched for is not reachable by an automated processing, but that their volume prohibits a manual one. Arguing that the integration of policies in decision systems can be better achieved through a semantic annotation than by the full parsing of the source documentation, this paper presents a technical environment that enables the building and exploitation of such semantic annotations.