Structuration sémantique de la réglementation

In this paper, we address the problems caused by changes in the regulations on the legal corpus and its calculative implementations. From the ontology of law suggested by R. van Kralingen, we construct a generic document structure, which renders explicit the semantics of legal documents. These are represented in a sufficiently fine and rigorous way to link together documents belonging to distinct levels of right. Thus we identify the nature of the relation which links semantics emerging from legal texts from distinct hierarchical levels. A generic matching structure is then proposed that can be instanciated in terms of hyperlinks. The whole of our proposals makes it possible to model not only the semantics of each legal document, but also the relations linking them vertically within the regulations. The semantics of the regulations are then clarified globally in the form of an hyperdocument, from the most general texts to the most specific texts of regulation implementing systems. Thus, we establish an essential and necessary support, which provides the opportunity for the establishment of coherency and conformity checking and an automatic impact study within the regulation.