"Law" certainly is more than just access control. Laws do not just
deny/allow things, they also require thing, quantify things, and so
on.
But it would be neat if this new spec would be interoperable with
XACML so that access control relevant aspects could be derived from
the legal rules and transformed into XACML for enforcement. But
that's a very ambitious task, so I am not sure how far one could
get.
Best regards,
Erik
On 2011-11-28 17:04, Tyson, Paul H wrote:
The
proposed TC will have a small set of use cases that can also
be addressed with XACML—for example, our profiles for Export
Compliance and Intellectual Property protection.
In
a larger sense, any *process* for putting laws into a
formal rule language can also be used to put access control
rules into XACML. If the LegalRuleML TC define “law” to
include any set of published rules governing the conduct of
a group of people, then XACML is fully subsumed by them—it
will at best become an alternate syntax and handy
architecture for handling a subset of their use cases. If
they define “law” to mean legislation and regulations
ratified and enforced by recognized authoritative
government entities, then the similarities are mostly
conceptual, but nevertheless very strong.
In
any case it seems there could be mutual benefits from some
level of coordination between the XACML and LegalRuleML TCs,
if only to prevent divergent solutions in overlapping areas
of concern.
Regards,
--Paul
From:
[mailto:]
On Behalf Of
Sent: Monday, 28 November, 2011 07:32
To: ;
; ;
Subject: [members] (ANN) Proposed Charter for
LegalRuleML Technical Committee
To OASIS Members:
A draft TC charter has been submitted to establish the
LegalRuleML Technical Committee. In accordance with the OASIS
TC Process Policy section 2.2:
(http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/process-2009-07-30.php#formation)
the proposed charter is hereby submitted for comment. The
comment period shall remain open until 11:45 pm ET on 12
December 2011.
OASIS maintains a mailing list for the purpose of submitting
comments on proposed charters. Any OASIS member may post to
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A telephone conference will be held among the Convener, the
OASIS TC Administrator, and those proposers who wish to attend
within four days of the close of the comment period. The
announcement and call-in information will be noted on the
OASIS Charter Discuss Group Calendar.
We encourage member comment and ask that you note the name of
the proposed TC (LegalRuleML) in the subject line of your
email message.
=== Proposed Charter
1.a Name of the TC:
LegalRuleML Technical Committee
1.b Statement of Purpose:
The goal of the LegalRuleML TC is to extend RuleML [RuleML
2011] with features specific to the formaliztion of norms,
guidelines, and legal reasoning.
Legal texts are the source of norms, guidelines, and rules
that often feed into different concrete (usually XML-based)
Web applications. Legislative documents typically provide
general norms and specific procedural rules for eGovernment
and eCommerce environments, while contracts specify the
conditions of services and business rules (e.g. service level
agreements for cloud computing), and judgments provide
information about arguments and interpretation of norms that
establish concrete case-law.
The ability to have proper and expressive conceptual models
of the various and multifaceted aspects of norms, guidelines,
and general legal knowledge is a key factor for the
development and deployment of successful applications.
The LegalRuleML TC aims to produce a rule interchange
language for the legal domain. This will enable modeling and
reasoning such that implementers can structure, evaluate, and
compare legal arguments constructed using the rule
representation tools provided.
1.c Scope of Work:
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law communities have
converged in the last twenty years on modeling legal norms and
guidelines using logic and other formal techniques [Ashley
2011]. Existing methods begin with the analysis of a legal
text by a Legal Knowledge Engineer who extracts the norms and
guidelines, applies models and a theory within a logical
framework, and finally represents the norms using a particular
formalism. In the last decade, several Legal XML standards
were proposed to describe legal texts [Lupo et al. 2007] with
XML-based rules (RuleML, SWRL, RIF, LKIF, etc.) [Gordon et al.
2009; Gordon 2008]. In the meantime, the Semantic Web, in
particular Legal Ontology research combined with semantic norm
extraction based on Natural Language Processing (NLP)
[Francesconi et al. 2010], gave a great impulse to the
modeling of legal concepts [Boer et al. 2008; Benjamins 2005;
Breuker 2006].
Based on this, the work of the LegalRuleML Technical
Committee will focus on three specific needs:
1. Closing the gap between natural language text description
and semantic norm modeling, in order to realize an integrated
and self-contained representation of legal resources that can
be made available on the Web as XML representations [Palmirani
2009]. This formal underpinning can then foster Semantic Web
technologies such as: NLP, Information Retrieval (IR), graph
representation, as well as Web ontologies and rules.
2. To provide an expressive XML standard for modeling
normative rules that is able to satisfy the legal domain
requirements. This will enable use of a legal reasoning level
on top of the ontological layer that aligns with the W3C
envisioned Semantic Web stack. This approach seeks also to
fill the gap between regulative norms, guidelines and business
rules in order to capture and model the processes embedded in
those guidelines and make them usable for the workflow and
business layer [Governatori 2010; Rotolo 2009; Grosof 2004];
3. Supporting the Linked Open Data [Berners-Lee 2010]
approach to modeling regarding not only the semantics of raw
data (acts, contracts, court files, judgments, etc.), but also
of rules in conjunction with their functionality and
usage. Without rules or axioms, legal concepts constitute just
a taxonomy [Sartor 2009].
The LegalRuleML TC work will address these three main goals
and provide means for modeling norms, guidelines, judgements,
and contracts using a semantic approach.
In particular, the LegalRuleML work will extend the existing
RuleML, RIF and related Web rule work by improved modeling as
well as representing and capturing the legal knowledge
embedded in legal texts.
Specifically, the LegalRuleML work will facilitate the
following functionalities.
A) Support for modeling different types of rules:
- CONSTITUTIVE RULES, which define concepts or constitute
activities that cannot exist without such rules (especially
Legal definitions such as 'property').
- TECHNICAL RULES, which state that something has to be done
in order for something else to be attained (especially Rules
governing taxation).
- PRESCRIPTIVE RULES, which regulate actions by making them
obligatory, permitted, or prohibited (especially obligations
in contracts).
B) Implementing ISOMORPHISM [Bench-Capon-Coenen 1992]. To
ease validation and maintenance, there should be a one-to-one
correspondence between the rules in the formal model and the
units of (controlled) natural language text that express the
rules in the original legal sources, such as sections of
legislation.
C) Manage the REIFICATION [Gordon 1995] of rules that are
objects with properties, such as Jurisdiction, Authority,
Temporal attributes [Palmirani 2010; Governatori 2009;
Governatori 2005]. These elements have to be added to the
current RuleML to enable effective legal reasoning.
D) Represent NORMATIVE EFFECTS and VALUES. There are many
normative effects that follow from applying rules, such as
obligations, permissions, prohibitions, and also more
articulated effects such as those introduced. Usually, some
values are promoted by legal rules as well.
F) Implement DEFEASIBILITY [Gordon 1995, Prakken 1996, Sartor
2005]. When the antecedent of a rule is satisfied by the facts
of a case (or via other rules), the conclusion of the rule
presumably holds, but is not necessarily true. The
defeasibility of legal rules breaks down into the following
issues: Conflicts and Exclusionary rules.
Lastly, the LegalRuleML work will also aim to model legal
procedural rules. Rules not only regulate the procedures for
resolving legal conflicts, but also are used for arguing or
reasoning about whether or not some action or state complies
with other, substantive rules. In particular, rules are
required for procedures which regulate methods for detecting
violations of the law, i.e., which determine the normative
effects triggered by norm violations, such as reparative
obligations, which are meant to repair or compensate
violations. Note that these constructions can give rise to
very complex rule dependencies, because the violation of a
single rule can activate other (reparative) rules, which in
turn, in case of their violation, refer to other rules, and so
forth.
In this case, the Deliberation RuleML and Reaction RuleML
parts [Boley et al. 2010] are coordinated within the
LegalRuleML module to produce benefits for applications and
reasoning engines (avoiding redundancy in the rules as well as
facilitating coordination, synchronisation, and cooperation.)
Compatibility: Compatibility with the RuleML 1.0 schemas
[Athan et al. 2011; Boley 2011; Boley et al. 2010; Wagner et
al. 2004; Boley et al. 2001] and interoperability with the
main languages for rule modeling, mainly Common Logic, RIF,
and SWRL.
Out of Scope: Developing tools for LegalRuleML. (This will be
started by the supporters of this proposal and others
independently once a first stable version of LegalRuleML
exists.)
1.d Deliverables
The LegalRuleML TC will provide XML representations that
address the aforementioned requirements and support
interchange with the business rule domain.
The following deliverables are expected:
D1. LegalRuleML semantic level (e.g. temporal dimension)
drafts - within six months of the first TC meeting
D2. LegalRuleML logic level (e.g. defeasibility, deontic, and
argumentation) drafts - within eight months of the first TC
meeting
D3. LegalRuleML integration with business and process rule
drafts - within ten months of the first TC meeting
D4. Pilot use cases - within twelve months of the first TC
meeting
D5. Tutorials and general documentation - continuously
produced and updated during the entire process
The semantic and logic levels constitute the core part of the
LegalRuleML functionality. They define the principles of
design, the architecture of the syntax, the main elements for
managing patterns, abstract types, groups of attributes,
general classes, ontology-level connections, and rule-level
connections.
Maintenance: Once the TC has completed work on a deliverable
that has become an OASIS Standard, the TC will enter
"maintenance mode" for the deliverable. The purpose of
maintenance mode is to provide minor revisions to previously
adopted deliverables to clarify ambiguities, inconsistencies,
and obvious errors. Maintenance mode is not intended to
enhance a deliverable or to extend its functionality.
The TC will collect issues raised against the deliverables
and periodically process those issues. Issues that request or
require new or enhanced functionality shall be marked as
enhancement requests and set aside. Issues that result in the
clarification or correction of the deliverables shall be
processed. The TC shall maintain a list of these adopted
clarifications and shall periodically create a new minor
revision of the deliverables including these updates.
Periodically, but at least once a year, the TC shall produce
and vote upon a new minor revision of the deliverables.
1.e IPR Model
This TC will operate under the "RF (Royalty Free) on Limited
Terms" IPR mode as defined in the OASIS Intellectual Property
Rights (IPR) Policy.
1.f Anticipated Audience
The anticipated audience for this work includes:
1. Vendors and service providers offering products and/or
services in the legal domain (e.g. eGovernment, cloud
computing SLAs, contracting, and legislation)
2. Authors of other specifications that require rule language
standards for legal, regulatory and policy representations
3. Software architects who design, write, integrate, and
deploy rule engines in the legal domain
4. End users modeling legal rules that require an
interoperable solution using a standard language
5. The U.S. NIEM community for government domain rule
management and representation
6. The OASIS LegalXML MS and other OASIS entities that are
providing input for and/or are planning to refer to
LegalRuleML from their specifications.
1.g Language:
The output documents will be written in (US) English. TC
meetings shall be conducted in English.
References:
1. Ashley Kevin D., van Engers Tom M. (Eds.): The 13th
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law,
Proceedings of the Conference, June 6-10, 2011, Pittsburgh,
PA, USA. ACM 2011
2. Athan T., Boley H.: Design and Implementation of Highly
Modular Schemas for XML: Customization of RuleML in Relax NG.
RuleML America 2011: 17-32
3. Bench-Capon T. and Coenen F.: Isomorphism and legal
knowledge based systems. Artificial Intelligence and Law,
1(1):65, 1992.
4. Benjamins V. R., Casanovas P., Breuker J., and Gangemi A.,
editors. Law and the Semantic Web: Legal Ontologies,
Methodologies, Legal Information Retrieval and Applications.
Springer-Verlag, 2005.
5. Berners-Lee T.: Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued
Open Standards and Neutrality, Scientific America, 2010.
6. Boer A., Radboud W., Vitali F.: MetaLex XML and the Legal
Knowledge Interchange Format, in Computable Models of the Law,
Springer, 2008.
7. Boley H., Paschke A., Shafiq O.: RuleML 1.0: The
Overarching Specification of Web Rules. RuleML 2010: 162-178.
8. Boley H., Tabet S., and Wagner G.: Design rationale for
RuleML: A markup language for Semantic Web rules. In I. F.
Cruz, S. Decker, J. Euzenat, and D. L. McGuinness, editors,
Proc. SWWS, The first Semantic Web Working Symposium, pages
381, 2001.
9. Boley H.: A RIF-Style Semantics for RuleML-Integrated
Positional-Slotted, Object-Applicative Rules. RuleML Europe
2011: 194-211
10. Breuker J., Boer A., Hoekstra R., Van Den Berg C.:
Developing Content for LKIF: Ontologies and Framework for
Legal Reasoning, in Legal Knowledge and Information Systems,
JURIX 2006, pp.41-50, ISO Press, Amsterdam, 2006.
11. Francesconi E., Montemagni S., Peters W., Tiscornia D.:
Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law
Meets the Law of Language. Springer 2010.
12. Giovanni S.: Legal concepts as inferential nodes and
ontological categories. Artif. Intell. Law 17 (3): pp.
217-251, 2009.
13. Gordon T. F., Guido Governatori, Antonino Rotolo: Rules
and Guidance: Requirements for Rule Interchange Languages in
the Legal Domain. RuleML 2009: pp. 282-296, 2009.
14. Gordon T. F.: Constructing Legal Arguments with Rules in
the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF). Computable
Models of the Law, Languages, Dialogues, Games, Ontologies
2008, pp. 162-184, 2008.
15. Gordon T. F.: The Pleadings Game; An Artificial
Intelligence Model of Procedural Justice. Springer, New York,
1995. Book version of 1993 Ph.D. Thesis; University of
Darmstadt, 1993.
16. Governatori G. and Rotolo A.: Changing legal systems:
Legal abrogations and annulments in defeasible logic. The
Logic Journal of IGPL, 2010.
17. Governatori G., Rotolo A., and Sartor G.. Temporalised
normative positions in defeasible logic. In Proc. ICAIL, pages
25-34. ACM Press, 2005.
18. Governatori G., Rotolo A.: Norm Compliance in Business
Process Modeling. RuleML 2010: pp. 194-209, 2010
19. Governatori G.: Representing business contracts in RuleML.
International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems,
14(2-3):pp. 181-216, 2005.
20. Grosof B. Representing e-commerce rules via situated
courteous logic programs in RuleML. Electronic Commerce
Research and Applications, 3(1):2-20, 2004.
21. http://www.niem.gov/pdf/NIEM_HLVA.pdf
22. Lupo C., Vitali F., Francesconi E., Palmirani M., Winkels
R., de Maat E., Boer A., and Mascellani P: General xml
format(s) for legal sources - Estrella European Project
IST-2004-027655. Deliverable 3.1, Faculty of Law, University
of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007.
23. Palmirani M., Contissa G., Rubino R.: Fill the Gap in the
Legal Knowledge modeling. RuleML 2009: 305-314, 2009.
24. Palmirani M., Governatori G. and Contissa G:. Temporal
Dimensions in the Rules: an Evolution of LKIF Rule, Jurix
2010.
25. Palmirani M., Governatori G., Rotolo A., Tabet S., Boley
H., Paschke A.: LegalRuleML: XML-Based Rules and Guidance.
RuleML America 2011: 298-312
26. Prakken H. and Sartor G.: A dialectical model of assessing
conflicting argument in legal reasoning. Artificial
Intelligence and Law, 4(3-4):331-368, 1996.
27. Rotolo A., Sartor G., and Smith C.: Good faith in contract
negotiation and performance. International Journal of Business
Process Integration and Management, 5(4), 2009.
28. RuleML. The Rule Markup Initiative. http://www.ruleml.org,
accessed 8th November 2011.
29. Sartor G.: Legal reasoning: A cognitive approach to the
law. In E. Pattaro, H. Rottleuthner, R. Shiner, A. Peczenik,
and G. Sartor, editors, A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and
General Jurisprudence, volume 5. Springer, 2005.
30. Wagner G., Antoniou G., Tabet S., and Boley H.: The
abstract syntax of RuleML - towards a general web rule
language framework. In Proc. Web Intelligence 2004, pages
628-631.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
2.a Identification of similar or applicable work:
The LegalRuleML TC will incorporate definitions and
terminologies from OASIS standards, especially from which
coming from LegalXML TCs, as well as from standards work done
by non-OASIS organizations. As stated in the charter, the TC
will use a standard from one non-OASIS organization and may
choose to use the works of other OASIS TCs and standards from
non-OASIS organizations, as it sees fit. Liaisons may be
established, and the TC may agree to concurrent work items
with other TCs and organizations, within the scope defined
here. Among other things, the TC may establish liaisons with
W3C (RIF), OMG, and other such standards organizations, as it
may choose.
2.b The date, time, and location of the first meeting:
The LegalRulML TC will hold its first official meeting on 13
January 2012 at 6:00pm UTC, 13:00am (U.S. EST), 10:00am (U.S.
PDT) 19:00 (CET) 5:00am (Australia EDT) by telephone and will
use a free conference call service. CIRSFID will host the
first technical meeting.
2.c The projected on-going meeting schedule for the year:
The TC will meet bi-weekly or as otherwise agreed upon by the
members of the technical committee.
2.d The names, electronic mail addresses, and membership
affiliations of at least Minimum Membership who support this
proposal:
1. Monica Palmirani, , CIRSFID,
University of Bologna, Italy
2. Guido Governatori, , NICTA,
Queensland Laboratory, Australia, and RuleML director
3. Antonino Rotolo, , CIRSFID,
University of Bologna, Italy, and RuleML director
4. Carl Mattocks,, Individual Member
5. Joseph D.K. Wheeler,, MTG Management
Consultants, L.L.C.
2.e Primary Representative Approval Statements:
Monica Palmirani, , CIRSFID,
University of Bologna, Italy
As CIRSFID's Primary Representative, I approve the LegalXML TC
Charter and its goals on legal modeling and reasoning, and
support our proposers (listed above) as a named co-proposer.
Guido Governatori, , NICTA,
Queensland Laboratory, Australia, and RuleML director
As NICTA's Primary Representative, I approve the LegalXML TC
Charter and its worthwhile goals, and support our proposers
(listed above) as a named co-proposer.
Joseph Wheeler, , MTG Management
Consultants LLC
As MTG's Primary Representative, I approve the LegalRuleML TC
Charter and its worthwhile goals, and support our proposers
(listed above) as a named co-proposer.
2.f Convener:
Monica Palmirani, , CIRSFID,
University of Bologna, Italy
2.g. Member Section:
The TC intends to be affiliated with the LegalXML MS.
2.h Optional list of anticipated contributions:
The LegalRuleML TC intends to use as a foundation and input
the draft RuleML specifications (http://ruleml.org/1.0/)
provided by the RuleML Inc. initiative, as well as any
subsequent input documents accepted by the LegalRuleML TC.
Best Regards,
/chet
----------------
Chet Ensign
Director of Standards Development and TC Administration
OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society
http://www.oasis-open.org
Primary: +1 973-378-3472
Mobile: +1 201-341-1393
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