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LegalRuleML: Design Principles and Foundations

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9203))

Abstract

This tutorial presents the principles of the OASIS LegalRuleML applied to the legal domain and discusses why, how, and when LegalRuleML is well-suited for modelling norms. To provide a framework of reference, we 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 comprises syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic foundations, a LegalRuleML primer, as well as use case examples from the legal domain.

G. Governatori—NICTA is funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Communications and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Centre of Excellence Program.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.xmlpatterns.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/browse/wsvn/legalruleml/trunk/scheschemas/rdfs/#_trunk_schemas_rdfs_.

  3. 3.

    The syntax presented here is based on Defeasible Logic, see [4, 27].

  4. 4.

    LegalRuleML defines a Legal Statement as an expression of a Legal Rule or a part of a Legal Rule where a Legal Rule is a formal representation of a Legal Norm.

  5. 5.

    Reference [14] identify more types of norms/rules. However, most of them can be reduced to the two types described here insofar as the distinction is not on structure of the rules but it depends on the meaning of the content (specific effect) of the rules, while keeping the same logical format.

  6. 6.

    Deontic Specification is the class that includes the various deontic notions used in LegalRuleML.

  7. 7.

    Akoma Ntoso is an XML vocabulary for representing legal, legislative, parliamentary and judiciary documents in a structured and semantic manner. Akoma Ntoso is managed by the LegalDocML TC of OASIS. https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=legaldocml.

  8. 8.

    Certain qualified attributes in external namespaces are imported into LegalRuleML.

  9. 9.

    https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/browse/wsvn/legalruleml/trunk/schemas/xslt/triplifyMerger-ids.xsl.

  10. 10.

    The full LegalRuleML representation of section 504 is available from https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/browse/wsvn/legalruleml/trunk/examples/tutorial/USC_17_504_context.lrml.

  11. 11.

    L’indennità di cui al comma 1 viene corrisposta in misura pari all’80 per cento di cinque dodicesimi del reddito percepito e denunciato ai fini fiscali dalla libera professionista nel secondo anno precedente a quello della domanda.

  12. 12.

    Nell’applicare la legge non si può ad essa attribuire altro senso che quello fatto palese dal significato proprio delle parole secondo la connessione di esse, e dalla intenzione del legislatore.

  13. 13.

    Alternatively, we could use \(earned(x,y-3)\Rightarrow \left[ \mathsf {OBL}_{ bearer=employer }^{ auxiliary=freelancer }\right] \textit{paybenefit}(f(x))\), while, from a formal point of view, it is semantically equivalent to (6) it is less close in meaning to the textual provision than its counterpart: the temporal reference in the argument would “third year preceding the year of the application”.

  14. 14.

    In this paper, we focus on Prescriptive and Constitutive Statements, which always lead to generated Legal Rules. However, in the general case, e.g. \(\mathtt{<lrml:FactualStatement> }\), something other than a Legal Rule may be generated when a Statement is in scope.

  15. 15.

    The full example is available from https://tools.oasis-open.org/version-control/browse/wsvn/legalruleml/trunk/examples/approved/maternity_alternatives_compact.lrml.

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Athan, T., Governatori, G., Palmirani, M., Paschke, A., Wyner, A. (2015). LegalRuleML: Design Principles and Foundations. In: Faber, W., Paschke, A. (eds) Reasoning Web. Web Logic Rules. Reasoning Web 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9203. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21768-0_6

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