CogniLex a legal domain specific fact based modeling protocol

Abstract

The Dutch Government has decided to provide services and enforcement actions based on laws and decrees. The vast majority of these services and actions are IT-based. The union of laws and decrees, both government and ministerial, are collectively called regulation hereafter. So far the large regulation based projects often have been running in the hundreds of millions over budget. Of course the Dutch parliament has held more than one investigation how to avoid this overspending, but there is still a lot to be improved. A number of government services organizations, academia and innovative companies has decided in 2012 to establish a co-creation with the aim to develop a national protocol to “translate the regulation” into a durable model that can better be used in intelligent work than the conventional textual representation. The cocreation, called “The Blue Chamber”, has so far issued two reports in Dutch and presented 5 papers at international conferences. In this paper we describe the conceptual architecture of The Blue Chamber and how the CogNIAM variant of Fact Based Modeling has been used to develop a protocol that is tuned to this specific but extremely large domain of legislation.