Representing Normative Regulations in OWL DL for Automated Compliance Checking Supported by Text Annotation
This addresses the need for automated compliance checking to reduce manual effort and errors in regulated domains like construction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing OWL DL methods.
The paper tackled the problem of automating compliance checking by proposing an annotation schema and algorithm to transform text annotations into OWL DL code, validated through a proof-of-concept implementation in building construction.
Compliance checking is the process of determining whether a regulated entity adheres to these regulations. Currently, compliance checking is predominantly manual, requiring significant time and highly skilled experts, while still being prone to errors caused by the human factor. Various approaches have been explored to automate compliance checking, however, representing regulations in OWL DL language which enables compliance checking through OWL reasoning has not been adopted. In this work, we propose an annotation schema and an algorithm that transforms text annotations into machine-interpretable OWL DL code. The proposed approach is validated through a proof-of-concept implementation applied to examples from the building construction domain.