Modeling Legislation by using UML State Machine Diagrams

The basic idea of modeling law, as presented in this paper, is capturing domain knowledge of legislation and specifying it in a generic way by using commonly agreed and understandable modeling concepts of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). State machine diagrams provide a graphical notation for describing the dynamic (time-dependent) behavior of a system. Business oriented behavioral models of legislation enable to understand the system better, support the detection of anomalies and help to improve the quality of legislation by validation and verification. Different types of anomalies in legislation are classified and described in the article. More specific, this paper presents a static analysis approach to the checking of correctness and consistency of the UML state machine diagrams specifications of legislation. The presented framework includes semantic and syntactic anomalies. Other motivation for modeling legislation is a desire to build court case management systems. The prerequisite of building such models is the transformation of legislation and regulations into system models that focus on different aspects of the computer system, such as programs that automates the business process and business rules, database, user interface, system procedures etc. Based on empirical research, assessment of proposed method is made