Workshop Overview

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 seventh 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.

The objective of the RELAW workshop is to foster the discussion related to requirements engineering triggered by any legal regulation or law.

Keynote

Cedric Thomas A strategy consultant with twenty-five years of experience in IT industry, Cedric Thomas took the CEO job at OW2 after driving the launch of this open-source organization. Previously, as both an investor and a consultant with FronTier Associates, the consulting company he founded in 1997, he contributed to the launch of several technology start-ups, actively took part in three IPOs, and provided strategy consulting to several global players in the software, hardware and services sectors. See www.ow2.org. cedric.thomas@ow2.org

Special Theme: Compliance Requirements for Big Data

The theme of the workshop is "Big Data and Privacy": The advent of Big Data technologies means that personal data, such as someone's location, habits, preferences, acquaintances and phone conversations, is routinely gathered and analyzed by business and government organizations, often without the consent or even the knowledge of an individual. In such settings, privacy is often compromised in seemingly irreversible ways, with little room for recovery of an individual's privacy rights, or recourse.

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.