| For global software companies with a client base that covers a large number of regulated businesses, regulatory compliance represents a significant challenge. The problem is that the world of compliance is becoming increasingly complex due to an increase in the number of regulations, laws, and standards that are being introduced every year. In addition, these laws are often created based on existing laws, resulting in a complex set of interdependent provisions where changes made in one place can propagate to affect other laws. To further complicate matters, many of these laws are created by different legislative bodies resulting in overlapping and sometimes conflicting provisions. There is clearly a need to investigate techniques and tools that can alleviate organizations from the complexity of dealing with regulatory compliance. In this thesis, we present an approach that facilitates the analysis of multiple regulations by exploring the citation relationship that links them to each other. Our approach is based on building a citation graph that can be used by an analyst to navigate through the provisions of various interrelated laws to uncover overlaps and possible conflicts or to simply understand specific law documents. We also present a tool called CompDSS (Compliance Decision Support System) that supports our approach. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the presented approach by applying it to different regulations. |
