Business Process Compliance (BPC) has gained significant momentum in research
and practice during the last years. Although many approaches address BPC, they
mostly assume the existence of some kind of unified base of process constraints
and focus on their verification over the business processes. However, it
remains unclear how such an inte- grated process constraint base can be built
up, even though this con- stitutes the essential prerequisite for all further
compliance checks. In addition, the heterogeneity of process constraints has
been neglected so far. Without identification and separation of process
constraints from domain rules as well as unification of process constraints,
the success- ful IT support of BPC will not be possible. In this technical
report we introduce a unified representation framework that enables the
identifica- tion of process constraints from domain rules and their later
unification within a process constraint base. Separating process constraints
from domain rules can lead to significant reduction of compliance checking
effort. Unification enables consistency checks and optimizations as well as
maintenance and evolution of the constraint base on the other side.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, technical repor