A Web-Based Approach for Traceability in Rule-Based Business Information Systems

We present how Web standards and technologies can implement traceability in business rules. This enhances transparency of business systems with facilitated integration of system components and data. Such traceability provides end-users access to source documents describing rules and facts that apply to users. This helps both users and developers ensure that how systems work aligns with documentation they derive from. Important features of Web standards include, links to document fragments, and links from not just concepts but assertions about them. In addition, a shared identifier infrastructure enables the integration of these functions of the document and Semantic Webs. We investigate how and to what degree conforming tools for existing standards can implement this communication between these layers. Analysis of how these standards and their applied components work here provides insight into what traceable business rule implementation requires in general. Our approach is to implement an illustrative scenario with standards to demonstrate their utility and provide insights into the issues involved. This scenario comes from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which related work often uses in examples of business rule implementation.