Modeling, Analyzing and Weaving Legal Interpretations in Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering

As many laws are concerned with information systems, each organization needs to carefully examine a law and determine technical requirements as well as its operational policies with sufficient concreteness. Legal interpretations essentially affect decisions made in refining goals, or making goals more concrete, that are directly or indirectly established by the law. As common and conventional interpretations are gradually identified and become widespread through appearances of cases and guidelines, goal refinement relationships need to be constantly managed and adjusted to the latest legal interpretations. This paper discusses an initial approach to management of legal interpretations together with goal-oriented requirements engineering, through a motivating example of a Japanese law on trade secrets. Specifically, this study proposes a metamodel for legal interpretation. In the metamodel, legal interpretations are modeled as refinement relationships between definitions of concepts or terms and then analyzed by matching with instances. Legal interpretations can then be woven into goal trees as criteria of goal refinement.