A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English

Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires the combination of a number of different elements, including information extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation, and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English. Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and demonstrate the workflow established by our tool

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

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

Towards a syntax for multimedia semantics

This article describes the current state of the art on representing the fouressential conceptual facets of a multimedia unit, namely the form and substance of content and the form and substance of its expression, and points to the still un solved problems regarding the syntax for media semantics. We first provide a brief overview of the general features of the MPEG-7 standard and its different parts. This serves as a description of the state of the art in content description for audio-visual media. We then analyse the ability of one of these parts for its capability to define structures for describing media semantics. We describe the problems of two currently conflicting MPEG-7 representations of expression-based media semantic, which should be equivalent. We then discuss high-level aspects of media semantics, namely the general problems of an ontology for media semantics. Finally, we talk about the problems of applying the theoretical conceptsto real applications

A Comparative Study: Change Detection and Querying Dynamic XML Documents

The efficient management of the dynamic XML documents is a complex area of research. The changes and size of the XML documents throughout its lifetime are limitless. Change detection is an important part of version management to identify difference between successive versions of a document. Document content is continuously evolving. Users wanted to be able to query previous versions, query changes in documents, as well as to retrieve a particular document version efficiently. In this paper we provide comprehensive comparative analysis of various control schemes for change detection and querying dynamic XML documents

Modelling legal knowledge for GDPR compliance checking

In the last fifteen years, Semantic Web technologies have been successfully applied to the legal domain. By composing all those techniques and theoretical methods, we propose an integrated framework for modelling legal documents and legal knowledge to support legal reasoning, in particular checking compliance. This paper presents a proof-of-concept applied to the GDPR domain, with the aim to detect infringements of privacy compulsory norms or to prevent possible violations using BPMN and Regorous engine

Data Model for Storage and Retrieval of Legislative Documents in Digital Libraries Using Linked Data

Many countries have provided online access to some types of legislative documents by subject, keywords or date. Nevertheless, the possibility of querying historical versions of the documents is usually an uncommon feature. The dispersion of laws and other legislative documents and their continuous changes make difficult the generation and querying of valid legislative information at a given date. Furthermore, the ripple effect of modifications such as updates, insertions or derogations affecting the entire body of a law or part of it is not always visible for the citizens who are looking for legislative information. Some issues related to change management of legislative documents can be identified: how to apply the history of changes to a version of a legislative document to obtain a new version, and what type of data model might be better to satisfy temporal queries, to store new versions of documents or to obtain them dynamically. The access to all versions of a document and its fragments is important in legislative queries to be sure which law was in force to apply when a case happened. Law documents are produced and stored in information systems with different data models to access and retrieve information about them in a large-scale manner, but most of them do not have law change management functions. Web standards, such as XML, XSLT and RDF, facilitate the separation between content, presentation and metadata, thus contributing to a better annotation and exploitation of information from these documents and their fragments to improve the historical queries and the version generation of legislative documents. This paper presents a proposal of a data model for storage and retrieval of different versions of legislative documents using Linked Data, a method of publishing structured interlinked data, for managing relations between legislative documents and its changes. Document structures, changes to legislation, metadata, requirements of historical queries are analyzed in this work. Furthermore, the proposed model facilitates historical querying of legislative documents and consolidation procedures, allowing update relationships between documents and fragments without changes on the original documents. The model has been tested with Ecuadorian laws, but it could be used for law systems of other countries because the model is independent of the legislative framework.This work has been partially supported by the Prometeo Project by SENESCYT, Ecuadorian Government