Tom M. van Engers

POWER: using UML/OCL for modeling legislation - an application report

The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA in Dutch: Belastingdienst) conducts a research program POWER in which methods and tools are developed that support a systematic translation of (new) legislation into the DTCAs processes. The methods and tools developed help to improve the quality of (new) legislation and codify the knowledge used in the translation processes in which legislation and regulations are transformed into procedures, computer programs and other designs. Thereby the time-to-market of the implementation of legislation will be reduced. In this article we focus on the method we developed for modeling legislation. We will elaborate upon the principles behind the method and explain the use of Catalysis and UML/OCL in the modeling process. The coupling of models of legislation and task models originating from business policy is demonstrated and finally we will show the way knowledge-based components in function of applications are generated automatically.

An agent-based legal knowledge acquisition methodology for agile public administration

This paper proposes a knowledge elicitation method based on serious gaming for theory construction about the effects of the law on the behaviours of agents. These games provide input to simulations of business process and product design alternatives. For knowledge representation, we have combined agent role descriptions with a generic task framework. An important thesis of this paper is that, in the interest of quick and simple domain analysis, agent roles, not intelligent agents, should be the focal object of simulation of complex social organizations. At least if getting a grip on social complexity is the purpose of modeling.

Proposal for a Dutch Legal XML Standard

This paper presents a proposal for an XML Standard for legal sources in the Netherlands. The standard intends to provide a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure and contents of legal and paralegal documents. It differs from other existing metadata schemes for legal documents in two respects; It is language-independent and it aims to accommodate uses of XML beyond search and presentation services.

Constructing a semantic network for legal content

The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA) is one of many organizations that deal with a multitude of electronic legal data, from various sources and in different formats. In this paper, we describe the results of a study aimed at better access to these sources by having a supplier and format independent knowledge store that describes the sources and their interrelations in a semantic network. Furthermore we developed parsers to automatically detect the identity of sources and typed references within the sources to other legal documents. These parsers can be used to fill and update the semantic network as new documents are added.

Semantic Web for the Legal Domain: The next step

Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a more general understanding of law is bringing into view a new landscape in which general legal frameworks – grounded in well-known legal theories stemming from 20th-century c. legal positivism or sociological jurisprudence – are made compatible with specific forms of rights management on the Web. In this sense, Semantic Web tools are not only being designed for information retrieval, classification, clustering, and knowledge management. They can also be understood as regulatory tools, i.e. as components of the contemporary legal architecture, to be used by multiple stakeholders – front-line practitioners, policymakers, legal drafters, companies, market agents, and citizens. That is the issue broadly addressed in this Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, overviewing the work carried out over the last fifteen years, and seeking to foster new research in this field, beyond the state of the art.

Adoption of High Impact Governmental eServices: Seduce or Enforce?

The adoption of high impact governmental e-services is not obvious. Especially small and medium sized companies hesitate to invest and adopt. Non-adoption endangers the realization of the 25% reduction objective within the EUs Lisbon Agenda of the administrative burden of businesses by 2012. On the other hand governmental organisations gain from the use of these e-services. In several cases this is the underlying argument behind the legal enforcement of the use of governmental e-services. In the study reported in this paper we answer the question which factors influence the adoption of these high impact governmental e-services. The designed research model has been tested in an empirical business-to-government context. In contrast to several business-to-business studies we found that especially organisational readiness is a hampering factor for the adoption of these governmental high impact e-services. These findings question the effectiveness of governmental enforcement strategies.

From policy-making statements to first-order logic

Within a framework for enriched on-line discussion forums for e-government policy-making, pro and con statements for positions are input, structurally related, then logically represented and evaluated. The framework builds on current technologies for multi-threaded discussion, natural language processing, ontologies, and formal argumentation frameworks. This paper focuses on the natural language processing of statements in the framework. A small sample policy discussion is presented. We adopt and apply a controlled natural language (Attempto Controlled English) to constrain the domain of discourse, eliminate ambiguity and unclarity, allow a logical representation of statements which supports inference and consistency checking, and facilitate information extraction. Each of the policy statements is automatically translated into first-order logic. The result is a logical representation of the policy discussion which we can query, draw inferences (given ground statements), test for consistency, and extract detailed information.

Legal Knowledge Conveyed by Narratives: Towards a Representational Model

The paper investigates a representational model for narratives, aiming to facilitate the acquisition of the systematic core of stories concerning legal cases, i.e. the set of causal and temporal relationships that govern the world in which the narrated scenario takes place. At the discourse level, we consider narratives as sequences of messages collected in an observation, including descriptions of agents, of agents’ behaviour and of mechanisms relative to physical, mental and institutional domains. At the content level, stories correspond to synchronizations of embodied agent-roles scripts. Following this approach, the Pierson v Post case is analyzed in detail and represented as a Petri net. 1998 ACM Subject Classification H.1.2 Human information processing, I.2 Artificial Intelligence

Knowledge acquisition from sources of law in public administration

Knowledge acquisition from text, and sources of law in particular, is a well established technique. Text is even - certainly in the context of the Semantic Web - increasingly conceived of as a raw knowledge resource that can be mined for knowledge routinely and automatically. As experience by large public administrations shows, the maintenance of traceability to the original sources of law from context-dependent knowledge representation resources of various kinds is hardly a solved problem, though. The use of IT in general has increased the organizations capacity for change in many dimensions, but because of the increasing use of IT the organization has to manage an increasing number of executable pseudo-specifications that contain knowledge of the law but fail to present a coherent picture of it. In this paper we present some of the guiding principles and ontological distinctions we use in the Agile project to accurately document the use of the law as a knowledge resource in administrative organizations.

Ontologies in the Legal Domain

Since the emergence of the Semantic Web building ontologies have become quite popular and almost every conference on information science including artificial intelligence and e- Government have tracks that cover (legal) ontologies. Ontologies are the vocabularies that can be used to describe a universe of discourse. In this chapter we want to explain the roles (legal) ontologies play in the field of legal information systems and (juridical) knowledge management. We emphasize the fact that these ontologies are social constructs that can be used to express shared meaning within a community of practice and also have a normative character. Many different ontologies have been created for similar and different purposes and two of them, both core ontologies of law that specify knowledge that is common to all domains of law, will be explained in more detail. The first one, is a Functional Ontology for Law (FOLaw). This ontology describes and explains dependencies between types of knowledge in legal reasoning. FOLaw is rather an epistemological framework than an ontology, since it is concerned with the roles knowledge plays in legal reasoning rather than with legal knowledge itself. Nevertheless FOLaw has shown some practical value in various applied European ICT projects, but its reuse is rather limited. We will also explain some aspects of the LRI-Core ontology which captures the main concepts in legal information processing. LRI-Core is particularly inspired by research on abstract commonsense concepts. Legal knowledge is based upon these commonsense concepts. Since legal knowledge always refers to the ‘real world’, although in abstract terms, the main categories of LRI-Core are physical, mental and abstract concepts. Roles cover in particular social worlds. Another special category is occurrences; terms that denote events and situations. In this chapter we illustrate the use of LRI-Core with an ontology for Dutch criminal law, developed in the e- Court European project and an ontology for Dutch administrative law developed in a project for the Dutch State Council.