Empowering knowledge workers (KWs) to act more efficiently and flexibly in unpredictable situations is the main focus of Adaptive Case Management (ACM), although ad hoc actions at runtime shall not violate the consistency and compliance of an on-going case. In this paper we discuss how business constraints stemming from regulatory laws or standards are transferred from textual sources to formal specifications in the form of compliance rule objects relating to ACM objects. In order to mitigate the knowledge barriers between business and IT, we apply an ontology-based solution allowing KWs to define compliance rules from a pure business perspective using domain-specific terms. We demonstrate the implementation using a repair service case and discuss the benefit of our approach for the sake of administration of business aspects by KWs without IT involvement.