DPCL: a Language Template for Normative Specifications

TL;DR

DPCL is a domain-specific language designed as a template for specifying normative policies, contracts, and norms based on legal concepts, aiming to unify and guide the development of normative specification languages.

Contribution

It introduces DPCL, a novel template-based DSL centered on Hohfeld's legal concepts, to serve as a reference model for normative language development.

Findings

DPCL captures key legal concepts for normative specifications.

It functions as an architectural reference rather than a formal logic.

The language is designed for cross-compilation to various application-specific tools.

Abstract

Several solutions for specifying normative artefacts (norms, contracts, policies) in a computational processable way have been presented in the literature. Legal core ontologies have been proposed to systematize concepts and relationships relevant to normative reasoning. However, no solution amongst those has achieved general acceptance, and no common ground (representational, computational) has been identified enabling us to easily compare them. Yet, all these efforts share the same motivation of representing normative directives, therefore it is plausible that there may be a representational model encompassing all of them. This presentation will introduce DPCL, a domain-specific language (DSL) for specifying higher-level policies (including norms, contracts, etc.), centred on Hohfeld's framework of fundamental legal concepts. DPCL has to be seen primarily as a "template", i.e. as an informational model for architectural reference, rather than a fully-fledged formal language; it aims to make explicit the general requirements that should be expected in a language for norm specification. In this respect, it goes rather in the direction of legal core ontologies, but differently from those, our proposal aims to keep the character of a DSL, rather than a set of axioms in a logical framework: it is meant to be cross-compiled to underlying languages/tools adequate to the type of target application. We provide here an overview of some of the language features.