Towards Legal Compliance by Correlating Standards and Laws with a Semi-automated Methodology

Since legal regulations do not generally provide clear parameters to determine when their requirements are met, achieving legal compliance is not trivial. If there were a clear correspondence between the provisions of a specific standard and the regulation’s requirements, one could implement the standard to claim a presumption of compliance. However, finding those correspondences is a complex process; additionally, correlations may be overridden in time, for instance, because newer court decisions change the interpretation of certain provisions. To help solve this problem, we present a framework that supports legal experts in recognizing correlations between provisions in a standard and requirements in a given law. The framework relies on state-of-the-art Natural Language Semantics techniques to process the linguistic terms of the two documents, and maintains a knowledge base of the logic representations of the terms, together with their defeasible correlations, both formal and substantive. An application of the framework is shown by comparing a provision of the European General Data Protection Regulation against the ISO/IEC 27018:2014 standard.