"As it was planned in the original ProLeMAS proposal, reified Input/Output logic integrates the main insights of Input/Output logic, a well-known deontic framework defined in the past years by professor L. van der Torre (the supervisor of ProLeMAS) and the reification-based approach of prof. J. R. Hobbs designed for Natural Language Semantics (NLS).
I/O logic adopts norm-based semantics. It has been argued in past literature that norm-based approaches provide a better treatment of norms than possible world semantics. However, I/O logic was so far studied only from a theoretical point of view, in terms of propositional symbols only.
On the other hand, Hobbs's logic is a wide-coverage logic for NLS able to handle a fairly large set of linguistic phenomena into a simple first-order logical formalism. The choice of Hobbs's logic has been motivated by the need of keeping the architecture of the formulae as simple as possible, in order to increase readability and to help controlling the overall computational complexity. Since legislation is huge, simplicity is deemed to be a necessary feature for a logical formalism in legal informatics, in order to foster active collaboration of legal experts, usually having little expertise in logic, who can contribute to the building of large knowledge bases.
The first case study where reified I/O logic will be used is the data protection domain, specifically the translation of the provisions in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR,
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj(öffnet in neuem Fenster)) as well as some ISO security standards. The aim is to build a knowledge base of formalae in reified I/O logic representing the norms in the GDPR, and to devise future cutting edge applications in legal informatics using it.
As it is well-known, the GDPR is expected to have a significant impact on the EU society because it will revolutionize how enterprises have to protect individual's personal data records. The DAPRECO knowledge base will represent in a machine-readable format the provisions in the GDPR and some ISO security standard. The idea is to correlate the two kinds of provisions in order to measure the overlapping between them.
To build the DAPRECO knowledge base we need to overcome, on the one hand, the limitation of the manual translation of the provisions (this would be highly time-consuming and error-prone) and, on the other hand, to support current NLP technologies that, even at the best of their performances are however unable to automatically carry out the translation with a reasonable level of accuracy. Thus, DAPRECO will support the building of the knowledge base in a semi-automatic fashion.
The DAPRECO knowledge base is expected to have a central role in the next years in the data protection field. New projects will be prepared and proposed with the aim of exploiting the DAPRECO knowledge base. One of these project will be ""Privacy4Big"", which will be submitted to this forthcoming call:
https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/opportunities/h2020/topics/ds-08-2017.html(öffnet in neuem Fenster)In Privacy4Big, it is proposed to interface the DAPRECO knowledge base with block-chain technologies, in order to devise privacy-compliant services."
