Abstract:
This paper introduces Deontic Logic Reified, a novel deontic logic implemented in RDF and SPARQL for automated compliance checking over Semantic Web data. The framework is designed to support scalable deontic reasoning by leveraging RDF as a standard knowledge representation layer, thereby enabling seamless interoperability with existing data ecosystems within the Semantic Web. Deontic Logic Reified incorporates and extends research that I have conducted over the last five years, primarily presented in three key publications of which I am the main author: [1], [2], and [3]. This paper integrates the results of
these contributions while addressing their complementary limitations. In particular, the paper extends the RDF/SPARQL framework in [3], which provides the core building blocks reused here, with constructs investigated and compared in [2], which surveys the main legal reasoners in the contemporary literature on compliance checking, as well as with constructs for implementing a temporal dimension for legal norms, which has been studied in the literature primarily from a theoretical perspective despite its crucial role in compliance checking. These extensions enable the resulting framework to achieve large-scale legislative coverage in a unified and executable manner. To demonstrate its applicability, a substantial subset of norms from the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), previously formalised in [1], is translated into the proposed formalism and executed over RDF data. The results show improved computational performance compared to the SHACL-based reasoner surveyed in [2], which is the only one among those considered that is capable of natively processing RDF data. All examples presented in this paper are available in https://github.com/liviorobaldo/dlr-swj, together with Java procedures to execute them.
