The False, the Former, and the Parish Priest

The FLINT Ontology: An Actor-Based Model of Legal Relations

“…Arguably the most relevant comparison for our work is to the UFO-L Legal Core Ontology [14,15]. 2 UFO-L provides a formal description of legal relations ( [17,18]) in the context of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO, [19]). Similar to FLINT, UFO-L has a rich representation for classes of power-liability relations, including ways of identifying what classes of actors can occupy which legal positions within the relation (power holder, liability holder).…”

“…We focus on the challenge of normative coordination: the process by which stakeholders in a community understand and agree what norms they abide by. Our aim is to develop and formalize the FLINT language, which allows a high-level description of normative systems [1,2]. FLINT enables legal experts to agree on norms, while also serving as a basis for technical implementation.…”

Identification of Contradictions in Regulation

“…Directives are instruments which bind the Member State as to the result to be achieved but leave to the national authorities the choice of form and methods (TFEU Art. 288) 5 . Therefore, directives need to be properly transposed into the legal system of the Member State.…”

“…Therefore, it is worthwhile to provide a legislative tool representing the structure and semantic content of the drafted provisions -to ascertain whether an inconsistency actually exists. Knowledge representation tools have been fruitfully used to represent legislation ( [3,4,5]). However, the development of such a model is a complex task, also because it requires expertise in the regulated domain of law.…”