Normative Requirements as Linked Data

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a proof of concept for the ontological representation of normative requirements as Linked Data on the Web. Starting from the LegalRuleML ontology, we present an extension of this ontology to model normative requirements and rules. Furthermore, we define an operational formalization of the deontic reasoning over these concepts on top of the Semantic Web languages

An ontology for the south african protection of personal information act

The protection and management of data, and especially personal information, is becoming an issue of critical importance in both the business environment and in general society. Various institutions have justifiable reasons to gather the personal information of individuals but they are required to comply with any legislation involving the processing of such data. Organisations thus face legal and other repercussions should personal information be breached or treated negligently. Most countries have adopted privacy and data protection laws or are in the process of enacting such laws. In South Africa, the Protection of Privacy Information Act (POPIA) was formally adopted in 2013 but it is yet to be implemented. When the implementation of the Act is announced, role players (responsible parties and data subjects) affected by POPIA will have a grace period of a year to become compliant and/or understand how the Act will affect them. One example of a mandate that follows from POPIA is data breach notification. This paper presents the development of a prototype ontology on POPIA to promote transparency and education of affected data subjects and organisations including government departments. The ontology provides a semantic representation of a knowledge base for the regulations in the POPIA and how it affects these role players

Time and defeasibility in FIPA ACL semantics

AbstractInferences about speech acts are often conditional, non-monotonic, and involve the issue of time. Most agent communication languages, however, ignore these issues, due to the difficulty to combine them in a single formalism. This paper addresses such issues in defeasible logic, and shows how to express a semantics for ACLs in order to make non-monotonic inferences on the basis of speech acts

Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support

A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations, with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure

Evaluation of Trust in the Internet Of Things: Models, Mechanisms And Applications

In the blooming era of the Internet of Things (IoT), trust has become a vital factor for provisioning reliable smart services without human intervention by reducing risk in autonomous decision making. However, the merging of physical objects, cyber components and humans in the IoT infrastructure has introduced new concerns for the evaluation of trust. Consequently, a large number of trust-related challenges have been unsolved yet due to the ambiguity of the concept of trust and the variety of divergent trust models and management mechanisms in different IoT scenarios. In this PhD thesis, my ultimate goal is to propose an efficient and practical trust evaluation mechanisms for any two entities in the IoT. To achieve this goal, the first important objective is to augment the generic trust concept and provide a conceptual model of trust in order to come up with a comprehensive understanding of trust, influencing factors and possible Trust Indicators (TI) in the context of IoT. Following the catalyst, as the second objective, a trust model called REK comprised of the triad Reputation, Experience and Knowledge TIs is proposed which covers multi-dimensional aspects of trust by incorporating heterogeneous information from direct observation, personal experiences to global opinions. The mathematical models and evaluation mechanisms for the three TIs in the REK trust model are proposed. Knowledge TI is as “direct trust” rendering a trustor’s understanding of a trustee in respective scenarios that can be obtained based on limited available information about characteristics of the trustee, environment and the trustor’s perspective using a variety of techniques. Experience and Reputation TIs are originated from social features and extracted based on previous interactions among entities in IoT. The mathematical models and calculation mechanisms for the Experience and Reputation TIs also proposed leveraging sociological behaviours of humans in the real-world; and being inspired by the Google PageRank in the web-ranking area, respectively. The REK Trust Model is also applied in variety of IoT scenarios such as Mobile Crowd-Sensing (MCS), Car Sharing service, Data Sharing and Exchange platform in Smart Cities and in Vehicular Networks; and for empowering Blockchain-based systems. The feasibility and effectiveness of the REK model and associated evaluation mechanisms are proved not only by the theoretical analysis but also by real-world applications deployed in our ongoing TII and Wise-IoT projects

Legal Ontology for Nexus: Water, Energy and Food in EU Regulations

Objectives of the thesis are – (a) to identify the problems in water-energy-food nexus from ICT and Law point of view and to propose theoretically a legal knowledge framework for water-energy-food nexus in order to reduce those problems technologically, (b) to construct and implement legal ontology for nexus extracted from EU water, energy and food Regulations in OWL 2 language, which is a part of the grater work of implementing legal knowledge framework for water-energy-food nexus pro-posed through the compilation of objective (a). Considering these objectives, this thesis presents total five chapters. Chapter 1 is dedicated to fulfill the requirement of objective (a) and the rest chapters are devoted for objective (b). More particularly chapter four presents technical descriptions of the legal ontology for nexus, while chapter two and three articulate methodological aspect of it. Chapter five evaluates legal ontology for nexus. Additionally, besides the list of references, annex 1 delivers all asserted restrictions used in this ontology and annex 2 provides the links of all modules and documentations of legal ontology for nexus.Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate programme in “Law, Science and Technology