Rossella Rubino

Fill the Gap in the Legal Knowledge Modelling

There is a gap between the legal text description in XML trends and the legal knowledge representation of the norms that from the text starts. This gap affects the effectiveness of the legal resources exploitation and the integrity of the legal knowledge on the Web. This paper presents a legal document model for managing the legal resources in integrated way and linking all the different levels of representation.

Computational institutions for modelling norm-regulated MAS: an approach based on coordination artifacts

As agent autonomy emphasises the need of norms for governing agent interactions, increasing attention is being devoted to (electronic) institutions for modelling organisations governed by norms. Moving from the concepts of role (with its normative consequences, i.e. obligations, permissions and prohibitions), norms (both regulative and constitutive), and normative agents, we first introduce the notion of computational institution for modelling norm-regulated MAS. Then, we discuss how infrastructural abstractions like coordination artifacts can be exploited to express norms inside computational institutions. Finally, we present an example based on the TuCSoN infrastructure.

Computable Models of the Law and ICT: State of the Art and Trends in European Research

This volume is devoted to the presentation of several research contributions from some significant European research projects in the domain of legal technologies. In this domain European research has been particularly active in the last years, often achieving global leadership. This is due to the commitment of individual researchers, research centers and universities, but also to the support of the European Union that in various research programs has devoted a significant attention (and some relevant financing) to legal technologies, considering them a decisive aspect of E-government and a crucial resource for the development of the information society.

A Java Implementation of Temporal Defeasible Logic

In this paper we report on a Java implementation of a variant of Temporal Defeasible Logic, an extension of Defeasible Logic developed to capture the concept of temporal persistence. The system consists of three elements: a graphical user interface for selecting defeasible theories, and for visualizing conclusions; a parser, which translates sets of rules in TXT or RuleML formats; and the inference engine to compute conclusions.

Integrating and Orchestrating Services upon an Agent Coordination Infrastructure

The adoption of Multi-Agent Systems for system engineering often requires legacy and human-oriented services to be integrated into agent societies. In turn; this aspect impacts the engineering of interactive systems that involve the cooperation of agents and (human) actors - such as, for instance, workflow management systems. In this context, the coordination model adopted by the multi-agent system infrastructure strongly conditions the design, development and exploitation of available services. In this work we address the issue of composing and coordinating services upon a suitable agent coordination infrastructure. First, we discuss how the infrastructures metaphors and coordination artifacts can be exploited to support service integration, and illustrate the envisioned scenarios making specific reference to the TuCSoN coordination infrastructure. Then, we discuss in detail the issue of the engineering of (possibly heterogeneous and legacy) services: the case study of e-mail, file transfer, and web browsing services is finally presented.

Implementing temporal defeasible logic for modeling legal reasoning

In this paper we briefly present an efficient implementation of temporal defeasible logic, and we argue that it can be used to efficiently capture the the legal concepts of persistence, retroactivity and periodicity. In particular, we illustrate how the system works with a real life example of a regulation.

Source Norms and Self-regulated Institutions

In this paper we shall focus on an important class of constitutive norms, which we shall call source-norms, namely those norms establishing what norms, on basis of what properties, validly belong to a normative system. Institutions including their own source-norms --- here called Self-Regulated Institutions--- are able to incorporate dynamically and autonomously new norms in their normative systems. After describing these concepts, we shall present a formal model of source-norms built by exploiting the PRATOR system for defeasible argumentation and we shall try to apply it to electronic institutions.

Development of the ALIS IP Ontology: Merging Legal and Technical Perspectives

The paper is partly based on research done for the EU-funded (IST- 2004-2.4.9) project ALIS (Automated Legal Intelligent System) on Intellectual Property Law. We describe the development process of the ALIS Intellectual Property ontology from both a legal and a technical perspective. We discuss the scope and the features of this IP ontology, the lessons learned, and the problems solved. This is done by comparing our ontology (the ALIS IP ontology) with the IPRonto ontology, which too is dedicated to IP. The paper also points out the benefits of both the ALIS system in general and the ALIS IP ontology in particular. Future development of ALIS will involve expanding its ontology to also include law and trademark law. Once these three legal ontologies are in place, they will be consolidated into a single ontology that will provide the framework for a general IP ontology.

Building computational institutions for agents with RoleX

While the sociality of software agents drives toward the definition of institutions for multi agent systems, their autonomy requires that such institutions are ruled by appropriate norm mechanisms. Computational institutions represent useful abstractions. In this paper we show how computational institutions can be built on top of the RoleX infrastructure, a role-based system with interesting features for our aim. We achieve a twofold goal: on the one hand, we give concreteness to the institution abstractions; on the other hand, we demonstrate the flexibility of the RoleX infrastructure.