A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Comparing Legislation

  • Alexander Boer
  • Tom van Engers
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 2645)

Abstract

In the E-POWER project relevant tax legislation and business processes are modelled in UML to improve the speed and efficiency with which the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration can implement decision support systems for internal use and for its clients. These conceptual models have also proven their usefulness for efficient and effective analysis of draft legislation. We are currently researching whether conceptual modeling can also be used to compare ‘similar’ legislation from different jurisdictions. Better insight in the process of modeling and comparing legislation from different legislators is expected to improve the capacity of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration to react to future consequences of increased movement of people, products, and money between EU member states and increased harmonization between tax authorities in Europe. In addition, the discovery of the requirements of comparing models is also expected to result in a more principled, more robust, and language-independent methodology for modeling legislation. This paper discusses known problems and requirements of comparing legislation, and the expected results of comparing models of legislation.

Keywords

Business Process Legal Concept Legal Knowledge Core Ontology Chess Game 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003

Authors and Affiliations

  • Alexander Boer
    • 1
  • Tom van Engers
    • 2
  1. 1.Dept. of Computer Science & LawUniversity of AmsterdamNetherlands
  2. 2.Dutch Tax and Customs AdministrationUtrechtNetherlands

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