Decidable Reasoning on Provisions and Norms for Legal Information Retrieval and Legal Compliance

The development of legal reasoning using decidable fragments of Semantic Web languages is essential to guarantee the computational tractability in the in the Linked Open Data cloud. This paper introduces a framework for legal knowledge representation and reasoning based on the distinction between the concepts of provision and norm, suited for different kinds of legal reasoning: legal provisions retrieval and norm compliance, respectively. The proposed framework allows the addressed types of reasoning to be implemented using OWL 2 decidable profiles and reasoners. Examples of decidable reasoning within the proposed framework are presented and tested.