Skip to main content

Reasoning about Conditions and Exceptions to Laws in Regulatory Conformance Checking

  • Conference paper
Deontic Logic in Computer Science (DEON 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5076))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of checking whether an organization conforms to a body of regulation. Conformance is cast as a trace checking question – the regulation is represented in a logic that is evaluated against an abstract trace or run representing the operations of an organization. We focus on a problem in designing a logic to represent regulation.

A common phenomenon in regulatory texts is for sentences to refer to others for conditions or exceptions. We motivate the need for a formal representation of regulation to accomodate such references between statements. We then extend linear temporal logic to allow statements to refer to others. The semantics of the resulting logic is defined via a combination of techniques from Reiter’s default logic and Kripke’s theory of truth.

This research was supported in part by NSF CCF-0429948, NSF-CNS-0610297, ARO W911NF-05-1-0158, and ONR MURI N00014-07-1-0907.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 74.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. U.S. Food and Drug Administration: Code of Federal Regulations, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/index.html

  2. Abrahams, A.: Developing and Executing Electronic Commerce Applications with Occurrences. PhD thesis, Univeristy of Cambridge (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Breaux, T.D., Vail, M.W., Anton, A.I.: Towards regulatory compliance: Extracting rights and obligations to align requirements with regulations. In: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Giblin, C., Liu, A., Muller, S., Pfitzmann, B., Zhou, X.: Regulations Expressed as Logical Models (REALM). In: Moens, M.F., Spyns, P. (eds.) Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ross, A.: Directives and Norms. Routlege and Kegan Paul (1968)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Boella, G., van der Torre, L.: Permissions and obligations in hierarchical normative systems. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on AI and law (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Reiter, R.: A logic for default reasoning. In: Readings in nonmonotonic reasoning, pp. 68–93. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  8. McCarty, L.T.: A language for legal discourse - i. basic features. In: Proceedings of ICAIL (1989)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Sergot, M., Sadri, F., Kowalski, R., Kriwaczek, F., Hammond, P., Cory, H.: The british nationality act as a logic program. Communications of the ACM 29(5), 370–386 (1986)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Kripke, S.: Outline of a theory of truth. Journal of Philosophy 72, 690–716 (1975)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Dinesh, N., Joshi, A., Lee, I., Sokolsky, O.: Logic-based regulatory conformance checking. In: Proceedings of the 14th Monterey Workshop (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Bench-Capon, T., Robinson, G., Routen, T., Sergot, M.: Logic programming for large scale applications in law: A formalisation of supplementary benefit legislation. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on AI and Law (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Holzmann, G.: The Spin model checker. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering 23(5), 279–295 (1997)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  14. Makinson, D., van der Torre, L.: Input/output logics. Journal of Philosophical Logic 29, 383–408 (2000)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  15. Makinson, D., van der Torre, L.: Permissions from an input/output perspective. Journal of Philosophical Logic 32(4) (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Prakken, H., Sergot, M.: Contrary-to-duty obligations. Studia Logica 57(1), 91–115 (1996)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  17. Marcus, R.B.: Iterated deontic modalities. Mind 75(300) (1966)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Sistla, A.P., Clarke, E.M.: The complexity of propositional linear temporal logic. ACM 32, 733–749 (1985)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  19. Dinesh, N., Joshi, A., Lee, I., Sokolsky, O.: A default temporal logic for regulatory conformance checking. Technical Report MS-CIS-08-07, University of Pennsylvania (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Rudin, W.: Real and Complex Analysis. McGraw-Hill Book Company (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Vardi, M.: The complexity of relational query languages. In: STOC (1982)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Lakemeyer, G., Levesque, H.: Towards an axiom system for default logic. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Halpern, J., Lakemeyer, G.: Multi-agent only knowing. Journal of Logic and Compuation 11(1) (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Fitting, M.: A Kripke/Kleene Semantics for logic programs. Journal of Logic Programming 2 (1985)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Monteiro, L., Porto, A.: A language for contextual logic programming. In: Apt, K., de Bakker, J., Rutten, J. (eds.) Logic Programming Languages: Constraints, Functions and Objects (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Dinesh, N., Joshi, A., Lee, I., Sokolsky, O.: Checking traces for regulatory conformance. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Runtime Verification (2008)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Ron van der Meyden Leendert van der Torre

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Dinesh, N., Joshi, A., Lee, I., Sokolsky, O. (2008). Reasoning about Conditions and Exceptions to Laws in Regulatory Conformance Checking. In: van der Meyden, R., van der Torre, L. (eds) Deontic Logic in Computer Science. DEON 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5076. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70525-3_10

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70525-3_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-70524-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70525-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics