Towards a Middleware and Policy-based Approach to Compliance Management for Collaborative Organizations Interactions

Organizations increasingly need to collaborate with each other in order to achieve their business goals, which requires the integration of systems running in different organizations. Such integration is usually supported by middleware-based integration platforms that enable different styles of interactions (e.g. service-oriented, message-based) between heterogeneous and distributed systems. In addition, these collaborative and integrated environments have to satisfy compliance requirements originating from different sources (e.g. laws, agreements) that may, in particular, apply to the interactions between organizations. This paper proposes a middleware and policy-based approach to compliance management for collaborative organizations interactions. The approach comprises design time mechanisms (e.g. a domain specific language, a policy language) and runtime mechanisms (e.g. a policy enforcement point, an obligations service) which extend a middleware-based integration platform. The proposal aims to promote the maintanaibility, flexibility, agility and reuse of compliance solutions in these contexts by providing the means to uniformly specify compliance requirements as well as to define how these requirements are to be managed within an integration platform.