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Handling irresolvable conflicts in the Semantic Web: an RDF-based conflict-tolerant version of the Deontic Traditional Scheme

Livio Robaldo, Gianluca Pozzato

TL;DR

The paper addresses irresolvable conflicts among deontic statements in normative reasoning on the Semantic Web by proposing an RDF/SPARQL-based computational ontology that encodes all modalities of the Deontic Traditional Scheme. It adopts a two-level architecture (level of eventualities vs level of statements) and leverages reification to represent truth values, contradictions, and contextual constraints, enabling explicit reasoning about violations and conflicts via SPARQL rules such as is-in-contradiction-with and is-in-conflict-with. The approach integrates Gordon-Hobbs natural language semantics to model abstract and instantiated eventualities, and provides concrete rules for obligations, permissions, prohibitions, and their interactions, including Smith-like arguments and partial conflicts. With explicit abnormality handling and RDF-based implementation, the framework aims to support interoperable LegalTech applications for automated compliance checking and normative analysis, while outlining future work on sets quantification and temporal management to enhance expressivity and practicality.

Abstract

This paper presents a new ontology that implements the well-known Deontic Traditional Scheme in RDFs and SPARQL, fit to handle irresolvable conflicts, i.e., situations in which two or more statements prescribe conflicting obligations, prohibitions, or permissions, with none of them being "stronger" than the other one(s). In our view, this paper marks a significant advancement in standard theoretical research in formal Deontic Logic. Most contemporary approaches in this field are confined to the propositional level, mainly focus on the notion of obligation, and lack implementations. The proposed framework is encoded in RDF, which is not only a first-order language but also the most widely used knowledge representation language, as it forms the foundation of the Semantic Web. Moreover, the proposed computational ontology formalizes all deontic modalities defined in the Deontic Traditional Scheme, without specifically focusing on obligations, and offers constructs to model and reason with various types of irresolvable conflicts, violations, and the interaction between deontic modalities and contextual constraints in a given state of affairs. To the best of our knowledge, no existing approach in the literature addresses all these aspects within a unified integrated framework. All examples presented and discussed in this paper, together with Java code and clear instructions to re-execute them locally, are available at https://github.com/liviorobaldo/conflict-tolerantDeonticTraditionalScheme

Handling irresolvable conflicts in the Semantic Web: an RDF-based conflict-tolerant version of the Deontic Traditional Scheme

TL;DR

The paper addresses irresolvable conflicts among deontic statements in normative reasoning on the Semantic Web by proposing an RDF/SPARQL-based computational ontology that encodes all modalities of the Deontic Traditional Scheme. It adopts a two-level architecture (level of eventualities vs level of statements) and leverages reification to represent truth values, contradictions, and contextual constraints, enabling explicit reasoning about violations and conflicts via SPARQL rules such as is-in-contradiction-with and is-in-conflict-with. The approach integrates Gordon-Hobbs natural language semantics to model abstract and instantiated eventualities, and provides concrete rules for obligations, permissions, prohibitions, and their interactions, including Smith-like arguments and partial conflicts. With explicit abnormality handling and RDF-based implementation, the framework aims to support interoperable LegalTech applications for automated compliance checking and normative analysis, while outlining future work on sets quantification and temporal management to enhance expressivity and practicality.

Abstract

This paper presents a new ontology that implements the well-known Deontic Traditional Scheme in RDFs and SPARQL, fit to handle irresolvable conflicts, i.e., situations in which two or more statements prescribe conflicting obligations, prohibitions, or permissions, with none of them being "stronger" than the other one(s). In our view, this paper marks a significant advancement in standard theoretical research in formal Deontic Logic. Most contemporary approaches in this field are confined to the propositional level, mainly focus on the notion of obligation, and lack implementations. The proposed framework is encoded in RDF, which is not only a first-order language but also the most widely used knowledge representation language, as it forms the foundation of the Semantic Web. Moreover, the proposed computational ontology formalizes all deontic modalities defined in the Deontic Traditional Scheme, without specifically focusing on obligations, and offers constructs to model and reason with various types of irresolvable conflicts, violations, and the interaction between deontic modalities and contextual constraints in a given state of affairs. To the best of our knowledge, no existing approach in the literature addresses all these aspects within a unified integrated framework. All examples presented and discussed in this paper, together with Java code and clear instructions to re-execute them locally, are available at https://github.com/liviorobaldo/conflict-tolerantDeonticTraditionalScheme

Paper Structure

This paper contains 30 sections, 5 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction: contradictions vs conflicts
  2. Background: compliance checking on RDF data
  3. The lightweight automated reasoner used in this paper
  4. Background: encoding natural language statements in (Gordon and Hobbs, 2017)
  5. Negation, conjunction, and disjunction of eventualities
  6. Abstract and instantiated eventualities
  7. Encoding (Gordon and Hobbs, 2017) in RDFs and SPARQL
  8. Representing not, and , or and $\neg$ , $\wedge$ , $\vee$ in RDF: the level of the eventualities and the level of the statements
  9. Representing conjunction and disjunction of eventualities in RDFs and SPARQL
  10. Abstract and instantiated eventualities
  11. Representing and inferring contradictions
  12. Representing further inferences
  13. Background: the Deontic Traditional Scheme and the state-of-the-art conflict-tolerant deontic logics
  14. Conflict-tolerant deontic logics proposed in the literature
  15. Revisionist strategies
  16. ...and 15 more sections

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: The Deontic Hexagon. In the hexagon, when two vertexes are connected via the "Implication" arrow, it means that the antecedent logically entails the consequent; when they are marked as "Contraries", it means that they cannot both be true; when they are marked as "Subcontraries", that they cannot both be false, and when they are marked as "Contradictories", that they always have opposing truth values, i.e., that they cannot neither be both true nor be both false)
  • Figure 2: A graphical comparison among the conflict-tolerant deontic logics proposed in the literature
  • Figure 3: The three levels of the computational ontology proposed in this paper
  • Figure 4: Compliance of obligations and violations of prohibitions
  • Figure 5: Compliance of obligations and violations of prohibitions