LegalRuleML Tutorial

10th December 2013 inside of ICAIL2013
Casa Dell’Aviatore, Viale dell Università, 20, Rome, 9.00-13.00

Proposers: Tara Athan, Harold Boley, Guido Governatori, Monica Palmirani, Adrian Paschke, Adam Wyner

Invited Speakers: Giovanni Sartor and Giuseppe Contissa

Motivation and Background: Several XML-based standards have been proposed for describing rules (RuleML, CL, RIF, SWRL, SBVR, etc.), or specific dialects (RuleML¹ family [Boley 2001, 2010]).
During 2009, a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF [Gordon 2008]) was proposed to extend rule languages to account for particular aspects of the legal domain and to manage legal resources. To further development of the representation of the law in XML-based standards, the OASIS LegalRuleML TC held its first technical meeting on 19 January 2012 [Palmirani 2011]. The objective is to extend the RuleML family with features specific to the formalisation of norms, guidelines, policies, and legal reasoning [Gordon 2009].

The work of the LegalRuleML Technical Committee will focus on four specific needs:

1. To close the gap between natural language text description and semantic norm modelling, in order to realise an integrated and self-contained representation of legal resources that can be made available on the Web as XML representations [Palmirani 2009].

2. This formal underpinning can then be used to integrate technologies such as NLP and Information Extraction (IE) with Semantic Web technologies such as graph representation and web-based ontologies and rules.

3. To provide an expressive XML standard for modelling normative rules that is able to satisfy the legal domain requirements. This will enable use of a legal reasoning level on top of the ontological layer that aligns with the W3C envisioned Semantic Web stack. This approach seeks also to fill the gap between regulative norms, guidelines and business rules in order to capture and model the processes embedded in those guidelines and make them usable for the workflow and business layer [Governatori 2010; Grosof 2004];

4. To support the Linked Open Data approach to modelling regarding not only the semantics of raw data (acts, contracts, court files, judgements, etc.), but also of rules in conjunction with their functionality and usage. Without rules or axioms, legal concepts constitute just a taxonomy [Sartor 2009].

The LegalRuleML TC work will address these four main goals and provide means for modelling norms, guidelines, judgements, and contracts using a semantic approach. The outcome is oriented to define a standard (expressed with XML-schema and Relax NG) that is able to represent the peculiarities of the legal normative rules easily and meaningfully.

LegalRuleML models:
– defeasibility of rules and defeasible logic;
– deontic operators (e.g., obligations, permissions, prohibitions, values and Hohfeldian rights);
– temporal management of the rules and temporal expressions within the rules
– qualification of norms (constitutive, technical, prescriptive, etc.);
– jurisdiction of norms;
– isomorphism between rules and natural language normative provisions;
– identification of constituent parts of the norm: agent, action, state, conditions, etc.;
– authorial tracking of the rules.

Objective:
This tutorial will present the principles of the LegalRuleML applied to the legal domain and discuss why, how, and when LegalRuleML is well-suited for modelling norms. To provide a framework of reference, we will present a comprehensive list of requirements for devising rule interchange languages that capture the peculiarities of legal rule modelling in support of legal reasoning.
The tutorial will comprise syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic foundations, a LegalRuleML primer, a comparison with related other approaches, as well as use case examples in legal domain.

Organization: half-day.
Monday, June 10, morning session. Exact time and location will be announced as the conference program becomes available. The tutorial will be held at the Casa dell’Aviatore, Viale dell’Universita 20 in Rome, Italy.

Web site:
https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/documents.php?wg_abbrev=legalruleml
http://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/browse/wsvn/legalruleml
http://ruleml.org/

Target audience: Researchers that aim to use LegalRuleML in their projects, technical and legal professionals involved in norms representation; logicians, Semantic Web and eGov/eBiz experts interested in legal knowledge modelling; industry and public administrators who aim to manage legal resources or legal knowledge.

References:

1. Boley H., Tabet S., and Wagner G.: Design rationale for RuleML: A markup language for Semantic Web rules. In I. F. Cruz, S. Decker, J. Euzenat, and D. L. McGuinness, editors, Proc. SWWS’01, The first Semantic Web Working Symposium, pages 381–401, 2001.

2. Boley H., Paschke A., Shafiq O.: RuleML 1.0: The Overarching Specification of Web Rules. RuleML 2010: 162-178.

3. Gordon T. F., Guido Governatori, Antonino Rotolo: Rules and Norms: Requirements for Rule Interchange Languages in the Legal Domain. RuleML 2009: pp. 282-296, 2009.

4. Gordon T. F.: Constructing Legal Arguments with Rules in the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF). Computable Models of the Law, Languages, Dialogues, Games, Ontologies 2008, pp. 162-184, 2008.

5. Governatori G., Palmirani M., Athan T., Boley H., Paschke A., Wyner A.: OASIS LegalRuleML, ICAIL2013, 2013.

6. Governatori G. and Rotolo A.: Changing legal systems: Legal abrogations and annulments in defeasible logic. The Logic Journal of IGPL, 2010.

7. Grosof B.. Representing e-commerce rules via situated courteous logic programs in RuleML. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 3(1):2–20, 2004.

8. Palmirani M., Contissa G., Rubino R.: Fill the Gap in the Legal Knowledge Modelling. RuleML 2009: 305-314, 2009.

9. Palmirani, Governatori G., Rotolo A., Tabet S., Boley H., Paschke A.: LegalRuleML: XML-Based Rules and Norms. RuleML America, Springer, 2011, pp. 298-312.

10. Sartor G.: Legal reasoning: A cognitive approach to the law. In E. Pattaro, H. Rottleuthner, R. Shiner, A. Peczenik, and G. Sartor, editors, A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, volume 5. Springer, 2005.