=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2049/02paper
|storemode=property
|title=Building the Legal Knowledge Graph for Smart Compliance Services in Multilingual Europe
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2049/02paper.pdf
|volume=Vol-2049
|authors=Elena Montiel-Ponsoda,Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel,Jorge Gracia
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jurix/Montiel-Ponsoda17
}}
==Building the Legal Knowledge Graph for Smart Compliance Services in Multilingual Europe==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2049/02paper.pdf
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance
Building the Legal Knowledge Graph for
Smart Compliance Services in Multilingual
Europe
Elena Montiel-Ponsoda1, Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel1, Jorge Gracia1,2
1
OEG, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
2
Universidad de Zaragoza
Abstract. This position paper describes the vision, objectives and methodology of
the LYNX project. The aim of Lynx is to create services to better manage
compliance, based on a legal knowledge graph which integrates and links
heterogeneous compliance data sources including legislation, case law and
standards.
Keywords. Compliance, Legal Knowledge Graph, regtech, regulatory compliance,
semantic web
Introduction
The term compliance is widely used to refer “to the conformance to a set of laws,
regulations, policies, or best practices” [1]. Every company performing almost any
activity has some concern with compliance-related problems.
These problems are a bigger concern for small and medium-sized enterprises
(SMEs), which cannot afford expensive consultancy services and they are a bigger
hurdle for companies trying to sell abroad, as they usually lack the knowledge on the
applicable conditions in the target country. According to the European Commission 1,
only 7% of European SMEs sell across borders, but those who do, exhibit 7% job
growth and 26% innovate in their offering, greater numbers than the 1% and 8% of
SMEs that do not go outside their local markets.
The European Commission is aware of these legal and language barriers and is
trying to build a single market with less entry barriers. The LYNX project is a
European research project funded as an H2020 Innovation Action covering the topic
ICT-14: Big Data PPP: cross-sectorial and cross-lingual data integration and
experimentation. The project is expected to last three years, starting in December 2017.
This position paper briefly presents this research project.
1
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-10-895_en.htm
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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance
1. The LYNX project
Having identified these compliance problem, and having assumed that technology can
help lowering these legal and language barriers, the main objective of Lynx can be
stated as “to create an ecosystem of cloud services to better manage compliance, based
on a legal knowledge graph which integrates and links heterogeneous compliance data
sources including legislation, case law, standards and other aspects”. Other specific
objectives follow:
to provide a platform that helps companies solving questions and cases related
to compliance in different sectors and jurisdictions.
to help European SMEs to reduce costs and effort in organising and
monitoring legislation, regulations, and sectorial good practices.
to provide citizens a better access to legal and regulatory information from
multiple jurisdictions and to facilitate their in the legislative processes and in
the writing process of standards.
to draw a legal knowledge graph across different jurisdictions, comprising
legislation, case law, doctrine, standards, norms, and other documents.
to deliver the necessary domain-neutral common services (such as document
annotation, interlinking, etc.) as building blocks to orchestrate aggregated
business-oriented services.
to cover some particular business case necessities, validating the project’s
developed ecosystem.
The referred legal knowledge graph is a collection of structured data and
unstructured documents which are densely interlinked. These documents shall be
variate in their language, and terminologies and language resources will also be
included in order to provide multilingual services. Semantic Web technologies favour
the distributed publication of documents and data, and provide the technology to
announce and traverse the links. Whereas the relationship between Semantic Web and
Law has been a rich one [2], there had been no “Legal Linked Open Data Cloud” (cf.
Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud) nor the term “Legal Linked Data” has gained
spread.
The Lynx Project will identify the major legal resources necessary to provide
exploitable compliance services, storing their metadata in a uniform manner and
running the processing routines to extract, structure, transform, annotate and link the
resources whenever needed. The cloud of Lynx services will be built, including
middleware microservices as well as end-user services, offered under different access
modalities. These services will be configured in three pilots according to the industry
needs in three different domains: labour law, data protection and oil & gas and energy.
The services will consider compliance in a broad sense, including not only compliance
with the law but also compliance with standards and even with good practices and
internal policies.
In summary, this project may benefit European business by means of a cloud of
services providing mass-customised regulatory information including legislation,
regulations, and policies, which will open the path for a new breed of solutions. Faster
answer will be facilitated to recurrent questions like: “What is the equivalent to
regulation X in country Y?” or “How is the technical question X handled in country Y?
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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance
How has it been understood by the local courts?”. As a side benefit, citizens will also
see legislation published in different manners promoting legal knowledge and
development of new applications. Finally, Lynx will also support the creation of a
common legal ICT infrastructure that will contribute to unlock the potential of a
multilingual, truly single digital market.
Acknowledgements
Lynx has received funding from the Horizon 2020 European Union (EU) Research and
Innovation programme under Grant Agreement: 780602. We thank every partner in
Lynx for their contribution to the project’s inception and the Datos 4.0 project with ref.
TIN2016-78011-C4-1-R.
References
[1] Silveira, P., Rodríguez, C., Casati, C., Daniel, F., D’Andrea, V., Worledge, C. and Taheri, Z. On the
design of compliance governance dashboards for effective compliance and audit management. In
Service-Oriented Computing. ICSOC 2009, pp.208-217. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010.
[2] Benjamins, V. R., Casanovas, P., Breuker, J., & Gangemi, A. (2005). Law and the semantic web, an
introduction. In Law and the Semantic Web (pp. 1-17). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
[3] Chiarcos, C., Hellmann, S., & Nordhoff, S. (2011). Towards a Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud: The
Open Linguistics Working Group. TAL, 52(3), 245-275.
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