T.M. van Engers

POWER: programme for an ontology based working environment for modeling and use of regulations and legislation

The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DCTA) conducted a research programme in which methods were developed that support a systematic translation of (new) legislation into the DTCAs processes. In the POWER programme, the knowledge capitalization/knowledge codification approach is combined with an organization dynamics approach in which the DTCAs knowledge processes are aligned. As a result, the DTCA will be able to improve the quality of law enforcement and decrease the time needed for implementing changes in legislation and regulations. We think that the POWER method can be applied in many other governmental situations and perhaps even in non-government organizations where regulations play an important role (e.g. process industries, assurance companies etc.).

Analysis of legal narratives: a conceptual framework

This article presents a conceptual framework intended to describe and to abstract cases or scenarios of compliance and non-compliance. These scenarios are collected in order to be animated in an agent-based platform for purposes of design and validation of both new regulations and new implementations, or to be used as reference base for a diagnosis tool. In our approach, legal narratives become a source of agent-roles descriptions, i.e. abstractions of individual characters/agents from singular stories, feeding the target applicative framework.

Implementing compliance controls in public administration

This paper presents a monitoring and diagnosis component of a knowledge cquisition, design, and simulation framework for implementation of compliance in public administration. A major purpose of the framework is to give a methodological justification for the exploration of compliance control policies. The knowledge acquisition approach depends on the storylike character of relevant case law and expert knowledge, and the compliance controls design space is derived from these stories.

Bridging Representations of Laws, of Implementations and of Behaviours

To align representations of law, of implementations of law and of concrete behaviours, we designed a common ground representational model for the three domains, based on the notion of position, building upon Petri nets. This paper reports on work to define subsumption between positional models.