Handling change in normative specifications

Normative frameworks provide a means to address the governance of open systems, offering a mechanism to express responsibilities and permissions of the individual participants with respect to the entire system without compromising their autonomy. In order to meet requirements careful design is crucial. Tools that support the design process can be of great benefit. In this paper, we describe and illustrate a methodology for elaborating normative specifications. We utilise use-cases to capture desirable and undesirable system behaviours, employ inductive logic programming to construct elaborations, in terms of revisions and extensions, of an existing (partial) normative specification and provide justifications as to why certain changes are better than others. The latter can be seen as a form of impact analysis of the possible elaborations, in terms of critical consequences that would be preserved or rejected by the changes. The main contributions of this paper is a (semi) automated process for controlling the elaboration of normative specifications and a demonstration of its effectiveness through a proof-of-concept case study.