or 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.