ESTRELLA European project for Standardised Transparent Representations in order to Extend

FINAL Project co-funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme (2002-2006) Dissemination Level PU Public X PP Restricted to other programme participants (including the Commission Services) RE Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the Commission Services) CO Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the Commission Services) Executive Summary This deliverable reports on the specification of syntax and semantics of the LKIF language, and should be read in conjunction with deliverable D1.4 on the LKIF ontologies. The proposed LKIF adds a terminology for deontic statements, and a special LKIF rule language to existing fragments of OWL and the rule language SWRL. The Technical Annex states about this work package: The main technical objectives of this work package are to develop a first version of a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), building upon emerging XML-based standards of the Semantic Web, including RDF and OWL, and Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for interacting with legal knowledge systems. The LKIF will apply the state of the art in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law, taking into account business and application requirements. Existing Semantic Web initiatives are aimed at modelling concepts (OWL " ontologies ") and rules (RuleML and SWRL). The LKIF will build on but go beyond this generic work to allow further kinds of legal knowledge to be modelled, including: meta-level rules for reasoning about rule priorities and exceptions, legal arguments, cases and case factors, values and principles, and legal procedures. In addition, an OWL ontology of basic legal concepts, such as obligations, permissions, rights and powers, will be developed, which can be reused when modelling a specific legal domain, such as tax law. In chapter 2, we elaborate on these goals, by developing more detailed requirements for LKIF. These requirements are derived from several sources: 1. From a survey of research on computational models of legal reasoning and argumentation, from the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law. 2. From an analysis of the business requirements articulated by the participating vendors, and from the logical reconstructions of the logics used by these vendors , as reported in the companion report, deliverable D1.2. [van den Berg et al., 2006]. 3. From feedback and comments by the participating user organizations and members of the observatory board on earlier versions of this report. Particular attention is given to normative reasoning, and the question why deon-tic logics are not really …