Eighth International Workshop on
Requirements Engineering and Law

In conjunction with the
23rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference

Ottawa, Canada Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Call for Papers

Practitioners and researchers from government, industry and academia are invited to submit short papers for review by our program committee. At least one author of accepted papers will be expected to register and present the paper at the workshop. Please review the planned topics, submission guidelines, and important dates in preparation for your submission.

RELAW encourages submissions relating to this year's theme ("Requirements For Lawyers; Requirements From Lawyers") in two general categories: (1) research or experience papers up to ten pages in length and (2) industrial or government problem statements between four and six pages in length.

Paper Topics

We are interested in papers from any requirements-intensive domain or industry, however, authors should submit papers that address one or more of the following topics of interest:

  • Identifying, prioritizing, and integrating relevant laws, treaties and jurisdictions;
  • Legal requirements acquisition, specification, analysis, and validation;
  • Formal and informal modeling of laws, policies, and requirements;
  • Traceability and alignment between laws, policies, and requirements;
  • Coordinating requirements change and the evolution of law;
  • Integrating the policy process and the requirements engineering process;
  • Introducing existing products and services into new jurisdictions;
  • Addressing the challenges posed by software built for multiple jurisdictions;
  • Requirements verification: monitoring, documenting, and auditing evidence of compliance; and
  • Risk and acceptable degrees of compliance assurance and system certification.

Submission Guidelines

Authors may submit papers in three general categories:

  • Research/Experience papers (10 pages max.)
  • Industrial/Government problem statements (4-6 pages)
  • Short Papers in each category (4 pages)

Submissions will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee for relevance to the workshop topics of interest. Preference will be given to submissions that emphasize informed, legally and technically sound descriptions of important challenges and problems as opposed to proposed solutions. Accepted submissions will be archived in a workshop proceeding in IEEE Xplore.

Papers must be formatted according to the IEEE formatting instructions for conference papers. There are several versions of the IEEE style. Please make sure you use exactly the versions that are linked below.

LaTeX users: please use the LaTeX class file IEEEtran v1.8 (CTAN archive) and the following configuration (without option 'compsoc' or 'compsocconf'):

    \documentclass[conference]{IEEEtran}

Word users: please use this Word template (see also the corresponding PDF file for comparison).

Make sure your paper:

  • does not exceed the page limit specified,
  • is in PDF format,
  • is in letter page size,
  • does not have page numbers,
  • has all fonts embedded in the PDF file,
  • uses only scalable font types (like Type 1, TrueType) --- bit-mapped font types (like Type 3) are not acceptable,
  • has all figures embedded in vector graphics (if not possible, use a high-resolution bitmap format of at least 300 dpi; do not use JPG, but a lossless format like PNG or GIF),
  • has all text in figures and tables large enough and readable when printed,
  • has a caption for every figure or table,
  • has the title and all headings properly capitalized (cf. Section Help),
  • has no orphans and widows (cf. Section Help), and
  • does not use footnote references in the abstract.

The use of color in regular body text (e.g., in order to emphasize words, URLs, or citations) is discouraged due to reduced readability and greyscale printing. The use of color is allowed in figures, tables, listings, and in non-body text, such as source code, XML snippets, etc.

Papers must be submitted electronically in Adobe PDF format to the EasyChair service:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=relaw2015