A Coverage-Determination Mechanism for Checking Business Contracts against Organizational Policies

The Edee system provides a framework through which businesses may store the data pertaining to business events, contracts and organizational policies, within a single repository using the unifying notion of an occurrence. A collection of stored queries (cf. SQL views) is maintained. Each query describes the occurrences promised and prohibited under the provisions of the contracts and policies of an organization. This paper proposes a mechanism for both the static and dynamic derivation of the overlaps between queries. We show, through worked examples, that by determining these covering relationships we can discover inconsistencies between business contracts and organizational policies.