16 research outputs found

    From legal contracts to smart contracts and back again: Towards an automated approach

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    Blockchain smart contracts, programs with the potential to automate transactions and beyond, have gained tremendous popularity over the past years. Central to the original of smart contracts is that every computable clause of a contract or agreement is encoded into arbitrary computer logic with the aim of coding this logic into computer programs, and let the program decide and execute what happens during the contract's life span. The term smart legal contract has been coined to describe smart contracts that aim to capture legally binding agreements between parties. This dissertation presents a method to facilitate the creation of smart legal contracts that constitute a legally binding contract and that can (partially) self-enforce their terms and conditions within that contract, regardless of the blockchain platform. Understanding how blockchain technology works is pivotal to grapple the ramifications of this choice for smart contracts. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the literature on blockchain to delineate architectural perspectives on the technology, and to define its properties. Finally, the chapter points out the current challenges for the technology and gaps in literature. In Chapter 3, a background on smart contracts will be provided using a motivational example. Chapter 4 expounds the research methodology, the research paradigm adopted for the research, and the philosophy underpinning the method called Model Driven Architecture. Following, in Chapter 5 a domain model for smart legal contracts is presented. The chapter demonstrates how the contents of a legal contract could be captured in a model using a motivational example. Chapter 6 is devoted to describing the models that can be employed to write smart contracts. The chapter presents a platform specific model for the Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platforms. A platform agnostic model for blockchain technology is thereafter presented that captures the commonalities between these platforms. Chapter 7 discusses how the main research question is addressed. Derived from the insights of the discussion some opportunities for future research are discussed. Finally, Chapter 8 concludes the dissertation

    Multi-Agent Systems

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    This Special Issue ""Multi-Agent Systems"" gathers original research articles reporting results on the steadily growing area of agent-oriented computing and multi-agent systems technologies. After more than 20 years of academic research on multi-agent systems (MASs), in fact, agent-oriented models and technologies have been promoted as the most suitable candidates for the design and development of distributed and intelligent applications in complex and dynamic environments. With respect to both their quality and range, the papers in this Special Issue already represent a meaningful sample of the most recent advancements in the field of agent-oriented models and technologies. In particular, the 17 contributions cover agent-based modeling and simulation, situated multi-agent systems, socio-technical multi-agent systems, and semantic technologies applied to multi-agent systems. In fact, it is surprising to witness how such a limited portion of MAS research already highlights the most relevant usage of agent-based models and technologies, as well as their most appreciated characteristics. We are thus confident that the readers of Applied Sciences will be able to appreciate the growing role that MASs will play in the design and development of the next generation of complex intelligent systems. This Special Issue has been converted into a yearly series, for which a new call for papers is already available at the Applied Sciences journal’s website: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/special_issues/Multi-Agent_Systems_2019

    Linked democracy : foundations, tools, and applications

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    Chapter 1Introduction to Linked DataAbstractThis chapter presents Linked Data, a new form of distributed data on theweb which is especially suitable to be manipulated by machines and to shareknowledge. By adopting the linked data publication paradigm, anybody can publishdata on the web, relate it to data resources published by others and run artificialintelligence algorithms in a smooth manner. Open linked data resources maydemocratize the future access to knowledge by the mass of internet users, eitherdirectly or mediated through algorithms. Governments have enthusiasticallyadopted these ideas, which is in harmony with the broader open data movement

    UFO-L: UMA ONTOLOGIA NÚCLEO DE ASPECTOS JURÍDICOS CONSTRUÍDA SOB A PERSPECTIVA DAS RELAÇÕES JURÍDICAS

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    Nas últimas décadas, o Direito tem se voltado para a Computação em busca de soluções para a representação do domínio jurídico, para o armazenamento de grandes volumes de informação e para a recuperação dessas informações com o intuito de gerar conhecimento para apoio a tomadas de decisões. Dentre as diversas soluções propostas para a representação do domínio jurídico, destacam-se as ontologias jurídicas, que propõem a representação de uma conceitualização compartilhada de conceitos jurídicos e suas relações. As ontologias jurídicas, que representam conceitos jurídicos genéricos passíveis de serem usados e reutilizados na construção de outras ontologias ou em linguagens de modelagem do domínio jurídico, são denominadas Legal Core Ontologies (LCOs) ou Ontologia Núcleo Jurídica. A abordagem da maioria das LCOs é a da representação do Direito focado nas normas jurídicas. No entanto, nesta pesquisa, optou-se por uma abordagem focada nas relações jurídicas para a investigação e para a construção de uma ontologia núcleo jurídica. Embora ambas as abordagens tragam benefícios, a vantagem dessa última é a possibilidade da explicitação de outros conceitos e relacionamentos que não ficam evidenciados na primeira. Em particular, o entendimento da relação jurídica como relação entre sujeitos que desempenham papéis jurídicos, com posições jurídicas inerentes a estes papéis, as quais estão dispostas de tal forma a influenciar os demais sujeitos/papéis jurídicos envolvidos. Neste contexto, o problema a ser atacado está na seara da lacuna entre Computação e Direito, ou seja, no problema de modelagem conceitual aplicada ao recorte da realidade jurídica e como ela é representada. A base teórica desta tese é composta por duas teorias: a Teoria dos Direitos Constitucionais de Robert Alexy e a Teoria dos Fundamentos Ontológicos para Modelos Conceituais Estruturais de Giancarlo Guizzardi. O resultado dessa investigação é um artefato denominado UFO-L e seu catálogo de padrões de modelagem, aplicado em análises ontológicas, na modelagem de domínios jurídicos e na construção de linguagens visuais de domínio jurídico

    Domain- and Quality-aware Requirements Engineering for Law-compliant Systems

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    Titel in deutscher Übersetzung: Domänen- und qualitätsgetriebene Anforderungserhebung für gesetzeskonforme Systeme Der bekannte Leitsatz in der Anforderungserhebung und -analyse besagt, dass es schwierig ist, das richtige System zu bauen, wenn man nicht weiß, was das 'Richtige' eigentlich ist. Es existieren überzeugende Belege, dass dieser Leitsatz die Notwendigkeit der Anforderungserhebung und -analyse exakt definiert und beschreibt. Zum Beispiel ergaben Studien, dass das Beheben von Defekten in einer Software, die bereits produktiv genutzt wird, bis zu 80 mal so teuer ist wie das frühzeitige Beheben der korrespondierenden Defekte in den Anforderungen. Generell hat es sich gezeigt, dass das Durchführen einer angemessenen Anforderungserhebung und -analyse ein wichtiger Erfolgsfaktor für Softwareentwicklungsprojekte ist. Während der Progression von den initialen Wünschen der beteiligten Interessensvertretern für ein zu entwickelndes System zu einer Spezifikation für eben dieses Systems müssen Anforderungsanalysten einen komplexen Entscheidungsprozess durchlaufen, der die initialen Wünsche in die Spezifikation überführt. Tatsächlich wird das Treffen von Entscheidungen als integraler Bestandteil der Anforderungsanalyse gesehen. In dieser Arbeit werden wir versuchen zu verstehen welche Aktivitäten und Information von Nöten sind, um eine fundierte Auswahl von Anforderungen vorzunehmen, welche Herausforderungen damit verbunden sind, wie eine ideale Lösung zur Anforderungswahl aussehen könnte und in welchen Bereichen der aktuelle Stand der Technik in Bezug auf diese ideale Lösung lückenhaft ist. Innerhalb dieser Arbeit werden wir die Informationen, die notwendig für eine fundierte Anforderungsauswahl sind, identifizieren, einen Prozess präsentieren, um diese notwendigen Informationen zu sammeln, die Herausforderungen herausstellen, die durch diesen Prozess und die damit verbundenen Aktivitäten adressiert werden und eine Auswahl von Methoden diskutieren, mit deren Hilfe man die Aktivitäten des Prozesses umsetzen kann. Die gesammelten Informationen werden dann für eine automatisierte Anforderungsauswahl verwendet. Für die Auswahl kommt ein Optimierungsmodell, das Teil des Beitrags dieser Arbeit ist, zum Einsatz. Da wir während der Erstellung dieser Arbeit zwei große Lücken im Stand der Technik bezüglich unseres Prozesses und der damit verbundenen Aktivitäten identifiziert haben, präsentieren wir darüber hinaus zwei neuartige Methoden für die Kontexterhebung und die Erhebung von rechtlichen Anforderungen, um diese Lücken zu schließen. Diese Methoden sind Teil des Hauptbeitrags dieser Arbeit. Unsere Lösung für der Erhebung des Kontext für ein zu entwickelndes System ermöglicht das Etablieren eines domänenspezifischen Kontextes unter Zuhilfenahme von Mustern für verschiedene Domänen. Diese Kontextmuster erlauben eine strukturierte Erhebung und Dokumentation aller relevanten Interessensvertreter und technischen Entitäten für ein zu entwickelndes System. Sowohl die Dokumentation in Form von grafischen Musterinstanzen und textuellen Vorlageninstanzen als auch die Methode zum Sammeln der notwendigen Informationen sind expliziter Bestandteil jedes Kontextmusters. Zusätzlich stellen wir auch Hilfsmittel für die Erstellung neuer Kontextmuster und das Erweitern der in dieser Arbeit präsentierten Kontextmustersprache zur Verfügung. Unsere Lösung für die Erhebung von rechtlichen Anforderungen basiert auch auf Mustern und stellt eine Methode bereit, welche es einem erlaubt, die relevanten Gesetze für ein zu erstellendes System, welches in Form der funktionalen Anforderungen bereits beschrieben sein muss, zu identifizieren und welche die bestehenden funktionalen Anforderungen mit den rechtlichen Anforderungen verknüpft. Diese Methode beruht auf der Zusammenarbeit zwischen Anforderungsanalysten und Rechtsexperten und schließt die Verständnislücke zwischen ihren verschiedenartigen Welten. Wir veranschaulichen unseren Prozess unter der Zuhilfenahme eines durchgehenden Beispiels aus dem Bereich der service-orientierten Architekturen. Zusätzlich präsentieren wir sowohl die Ergebnisse der Anwendung unseres Prozesses (bzw. Teilen davon) auf zwei reale Fälle aus den Bereichen von Smart Grids und Wahlsystemen, als auch alle anderen Ergebnisse der wissenschaftlichen Methoden, die wir genutzt haben, um unsere Lösung zu fundieren und validieren.The long known credo of requirements engineering states that it is challenging to build the right system if you do not know what right is. There is strong evidence that this credo exactly defines and describes the necessity of requirements engineering. Fixing a defect when it is already fielded is reported to be up to eighty times more expensive than fixing the corresponding requirements defects early on. In general, conducting sufficient requirements engineering has shown to be a crucial success factor for software development projects. Throughout the progression from initial stakeholders' wishes regarding the system-to-be to a specification for the system-to-be requirements engineers have to undergo a complex decision process for forming the actual plan connecting stakeholder wishes and the final specification. Indeed, decision making is considered to be an inherent part of requirements engineering. In this thesis, we try to understand which activities and information are needed for selecting requirements, which the challenges are, how an ideal solution for selecting requirements would look like, and where the current state of the art is deficient regarding the ideal solution. Within this thesis we identify the information necessary for an informed requirements selection, present a process in which one collects all the necessary information, highlight the challenges to be addressed by this process and its activities, and a selection of methods to conduct the activities of the process. All the collected information is then used for an automated requirements selection using an optimization model which is also part of the contribution of this thesis. As we identified two major gaps in the state of the art considering the proposed process and its activities, we also present two novel methods for context elicitation and for legal compliance requirements elicitation to fill the gaps as part of the main contribution. Our solution for context elicitation enables a domain-specific context establishment based on patterns for different domains. The context patterns allow a structured elicitation and documentation of relevant stakeholders and technical entities for a system-to-be. Both, the documentation in means of graphical pattern instances and textual template instances as well as the method for collecting the necessary information are explicitly given in each context pattern. Additionally, we also provide the means which are necessary to derive new context patterns and extend our context patterns language which is part of this thesis. Our solution for legal compliance requirements elicitation is a pattern-based and guided method which lets one identify the relevant laws for a system-to-be, which is described in means of functional requirements, and which intertwines the functional requirements with the according legal requirements. This method relies on the collaboration of requirements engineers and legal experts, and bridges the gap between their distinct worlds. Our process is exemplified using a running example in the domain of service oriented architectures. Additionally, the results of applying (parts of) the process to real life cases from the smart grid domain and voting system domain are presented, as well as all other results from the scientific means we took to ground and validate the proposed solutions

    Data-driven conceptual modeling: how some knowledge drivers for the enterprise might be mined from enterprise data

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    As organizations perform their business, they analyze, design and manage a variety of processes represented in models with different scopes and scale of complexity. Specifying these processes requires a certain level of modeling competence. However, this condition does not seem to be balanced with adequate capability of the person(s) who are responsible for the task of defining and modeling an organization or enterprise operation. On the other hand, an enterprise typically collects various records of all events occur during the operation of their processes. Records, such as the start and end of the tasks in a process instance, state transitions of objects impacted by the process execution, the message exchange during the process execution, etc., are maintained in enterprise repositories as various logs, such as event logs, process logs, effect logs, message logs, etc. Furthermore, the growth rate in the volume of these data generated by enterprise process execution has increased manyfold in just a few years. On top of these, models often considered as the dashboard view of an enterprise. Models represents an abstraction of the underlying reality of an enterprise. Models also served as the knowledge driver through which an enterprise can be managed. Data-driven extraction offers the capability to mine these knowledge drivers from enterprise data and leverage the mined models to establish the set of enterprise data that conforms with the desired behaviour. This thesis aimed to generate models or knowledge drivers from enterprise data to enable some type of dashboard view of enterprise to provide support for analysts. The rationale for this has been started as the requirement to improve an existing process or to create a new process. It was also mentioned models can also serve as a collection of effectors through which an organization or an enterprise can be managed. The enterprise data refer to above has been identified as process logs, effect logs, message logs, and invocation logs. The approach in this thesis is to mine these logs to generate process, requirement, and enterprise architecture models, and how goals get fulfilled based on collected operational data. The above a research question has been formulated as whether it is possible to derive the knowledge drivers from the enterprise data, which represent the running operation of the enterprise, or in other words, is it possible to use the available data in the enterprise repository to generate the knowledge drivers? . In Chapter 2, review of literature that can provide the necessary background knowledge to explore the above research question has been presented. Chapter 3 presents how process semantics can be mined. Chapter 4 suggest a way to extract a requirements model. The Chapter 5 presents a way to discover the underlying enterprise architecture and Chapter 6 presents a way to mine how goals get orchestrated. Overall finding have been discussed in Chapter 7 to derive some conclusions

    Ontologies for Legal Relevance and Consumer Complaints. A Case Study in the Air Transport Passenger Domain

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    Applying relevant legal information to settle complaints and disputes is a common challenge for all legal practitioners and laymen. However, the analysis of the concept of relevance itself has thus far attracted only sporadic attention. This thesis bridges this gap by understanding the components of complaints, and by defining relevant legal information, and makes use of computational ontologies and design patterns to represent this relevant knowledge in an explicit and structured way. This work uses as a case-study a real situation of consumer disputes in the Air Transport Passenger domain. Two artifacts were built: the Relevant Legal Information in Consumer Disputes Ontology, and its specialization, the Air Transport Passenger Incidents Ontology, aimed at modelling relevant legal information; and the Complaint Design Pattern proposed to conceptualize complaints. In order to demonstrate the ability of the ontologies to serve as a knowledge base for a computer program providing relevant legal information, a demonstrative application was developed

    Legal compliance by design (LCbD) and through design (LCtD) : preliminary survey

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    1st Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance co-located with the 30th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2017). The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) carrying out a preliminary survey of the literature and research projects on Compliance by Design (CbD); and (ii) clarifying the double process of (a) extending business managing techniques to other regulatory fields, and (b) converging trends in legal theory, legal technology and Artificial Intelligence. The paper highlights the connections and differences we found across different domains and proposals. We distinguish three different policydriven types of CbD: (i) business, (ii) regulatory, (iii) and legal. The recent deployment of ethical views, and the implementation of general principles of privacy and data protection lead to the conclusion that, in order to appropriately define legal compliance, Compliance through Design (CtD) should be differentiated from CbD

    Regulatory Compliance-oriented Impediments and Associated Effort Estimation Metrics in Requirements Engineering for Contractual Systems Engineering Projects

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    Large-scale contractual systems engineering projects often need to comply with a myriad of government regulations and standards as part of contractual fulfillment. A key activity in the requirements engineering (RE) process for such a project is to elicit appropriate requirements from the regulations and standards that apply to the target system. However, there are impediments in achieving compliance due to such factors as: the voluminous contract and its high-level specifications, large number of regulatory documents, and multiple domains of the system. Little empirical research has been conducted on developing a shared understanding of the compliance-oriented complexities involved in such projects, and identifying and developing RE support (such as processes, tools, metrics, and methods) to improve overall performance for compliance projects. Through three studies on an industrial RE project, we investigated a number of issues in RE concerning compliance, leading to the following novel results:(i) a meta-model that captures artefacts-types and their compliance-oriented inter-relationships that exist in RE for contractual systems engineering projects; (ii) discovery of key impediments to requirements-compliance due to: (a) contractual complexities (e.g., regulatory requirements specified non-contiguously with non-regulatory requirements in the contract at the ratio of 1:19), (b) complexities in regulatory documents (e.g., over 300 regulatory documents being relevant to the subject system), and (c) large and complex system (e.g., 40% of the contractual regulatory requirements are cross-cutting); (iii) a method for deriving base metrics for estimating the effort needed to do compliance work during RE and demonstrate how a set of derived metrics can be used to create an effort estimation model for such work; (iv) a framework for structuring diverse regulatory documents and requirements for global product developments. These results lay a foundation in RE research on compliance issues with anticipation for its impact in real-world projects and in RE research
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