Subcontracting, Assignment, and Substitution for Legal Contracts in Symboleo

From Legal Contracts to Formal Specifications: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The refinement of the SQs and the indications of the three expert authors allowed the identification of the following works to ensure that main approaches to formalize specification languages for contracts were included [7,39,53,72,99], legal ontologies [6,48,54], and reviews [27,77]. Concerning the proceedings of recent conferences, the works in [2,5,40,80,82,87,89,90] have been included. The outcome of applying SQs for all six RQs and the refinement process led to the identification of a total of 447 publications.…”

“…Contracts are represented as collections of obligations and powers and are about roles, who are their debtors and beneficiaries, and assets that change state, usually ownership. The validity of a formal specification can be checked, as demonstrated in subsequent work on Symboleo that presents the validation of two standard business contracts with a compliance checker [80]. Symboleo represents the most complete, detailed approach we identified in the SLR to generate formal contract specifications.…”

“…Most of the few approaches that perform the full process at first identify concepts and relationships in a legal text to subsequently formally represent them with formal logics described in works related to RQ5. The most recurring approach relies on the annotation of the concepts using an ontology to generate a skeleton of specifications and formal expressions in [2,5,80]. Other approaches are tailored to the generation of models of law [99], Internet contracts [49], or rely on conditional structures [52] to extract and model contract elements.…”

“…A legal ontology frequently applied is CLO, which gained traction also thanks to [43] that relies on DOLCE and a JurWordNet lexicon. Similarly, there are ontologies adapted from CLO [42] or its evolution UFO-L CLO [2,5,6,48,80]. The SLR seems to suggest the importance of using a common standard to express an ontology, frequently implemented in OWL, and based on an existing ontology, such as CLO to rely on a solid, well-documented, and comparable basis.…”

“…First-Order Logic, on the other hand, has been used by [41,86]; its limitations concern the representation of categories and quantification of relations. Event Calculus-that similarly to smart contracts relies on an event-based logic-allows the representation of temporal events and their inter-relationships, and is used by [80]. Sleimi et al [90] rely on templates for an intermediate step to formalize NL from legal documents.…”