Connecting People: Semantic-Conceptual Modeling for Laws and Regulations

Abstract

Part 2: Services and InteroperabilityInternational audienceWorking on building large scale information systems that have the job to serve their clients in a client friendly way and at the same time have to comply with the rules that regulate their behavior, including their (legal) decision-making processes, we observed that designing these systems is still more an art rather than a result of systematic engineering. We have been working on a method allowing stakeholders to systematically analyze the rules and their meaning (i.e. their effect in practical cases) in such way that it supports systems designers and (legal) experts in making sense out of the legal sources, and use this understanding of the regulatory system at hand when designing information systems that supports both the (administrative) organizations and their clients. In this paper we will elaborate on our proposed analysis approach, show how to systematically use the patterns explicitly but often implicitly available in laws and regulation. The Hohfeld conceptual model is very helpful. The Hohfeld model needs extension in our view and thus we have specified the semantic-conceptual model for Hohfeld as a solid base to add time travel aspects

At your service, on the definition of services from sources of law

“…In this step multidisciplinary teams give their input, and the results are described in such way that they are comprehensible for all team members. The method for translating the jural relations into relational algebra, step 5, is presented in [6]. These models represent multiple perspectives and can be used to inform multiple target groups with the results of our analysis.…”

“…Our method is based on a multi-layered knowledge representation architecture [6]. This architecture separates structural descriptions and referential mechanisms of sources of law, the institutional elements and structures described by those sources of law (institutional layer), the social structures, roles, behavior and assertions about them (reality layer).…”

“…This has resulted in an approach that enabled us to avoid the typical single task orientation used in Sergot et al In order to achieve this we used formal models [6] that are based upon an extended version of Hohfeld's model [8]. In previous research projects we have showed that Hohfeld's initial model already is a big improvement to the traditional interpretation of rights, duties and allowances in (modal) logic [18].…”

“…Jural relations have been introduced by Wesley Hohfeld in 1919 [8]. In [6] we described the method for translating the jural relations into relational algebra. In that paper we also describe how we formally represent jural states.…”

“…For scoping we use the following procedure: select an acting person (this can also be an organization) and describe the context of the acts of the agent (1); choose a starting point for the analysis: a legal statement that contains a condition and is relevant in the chosen context (2); perform a linguistic analysis of a selected sentence (3); transform the text to the active voice, thus ensuring the subject of the sentence is an acting person (4); identify explicit references and terms that need a definition (5); select words or constituents that contain or might contain an implicit reference. Make these references explicit, or make an explicit decision that further analysis is not relevant in the chosen context (6); analyze all the selected words and constituents, starting with point 2 of this procedure (7); the procedure ends when all relevant references analyzed, the decision to end the analysis is being made by a multidisciplinary working group in which legal experts, policy advisors, and practitioners are represented (8).…”