Tom Engers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Tom Engers

a computational model for institutional scenarios

METALex provides a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure ... more METALex provides a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure and contents of any type of regulation. This paper discusses some design decisions related to timekeeping and versions. Version management guidelines for legislation are typically codified in legislation or considered part of customary law. This obviously makes them jurisdiction-specific, although there are common requirements. Our point of view is that we try to find common requirements by looking at the functions of specific timestamping and versioning practices. If we cannot properly support a certain kind of function we do not try to provide XML facilities for that function, but leave the issue open for other extensions to the schema. 1

Accessibility of legal sources is crucial to both jurists and citizens. As the development of E-g... more Accessibility of legal sources is crucial to both jurists and citizens. As the development of E-government is speeded up the number of legal information systems including knowledge-based services is likely to increase accordingly. In the Program for an Ontology-based Working Environment for Rules and legislation (POWER) the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (Belastingdienst) developed a formal modelling approach for modelling legal sources. The results of applying this modelling process are formal models expressed in UML/OCL which can be used as the basis for amongst others verification, simulation and application generation. Since the

Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2000

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, 2016

This paper introduces a methodology for the acquisition of the computational model of a service p... more This paper introduces a methodology for the acquisition of the computational model of a service provider group and its transformation into agent-based model. The methodology is as follows. First, we analyze the case at the signal layer, i.e. the message exchange between actors, and model them with the components of "belief, desire and intention (BDI)" agent architecture. In the next step, we identify the implicit actions, intentions, and conditions which are necessary for the story to occur. These steps correspond to descriptions of agent-roles observed in the case study. As a concrete result, a preliminary implementation of the framework has been developed with Groovy.

Semantic Web, 2016

Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood.... more Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a more general understanding of law is bringing into view a new landscape in which general legal frameworks-grounded in well-known legal theories stemming from 20th-century c. legal positivism or sociological jurisprudence-are made compatible with specific forms of rights management on the Web. In this sense, Semantic Web tools are not only being designed for information retrieval, classification, clustering, and knowledge management. They can also be understood as regulatory tools, i.e. as components of the contemporary legal architecture, to be used by multiple stakeholders-front-line practitioners, policymakers, legal drafters, companies, market agents, and citizens. That is the issue broadly addressed in this Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, overviewing the work carried out over the last fifteen years, and seeking to foster new research in this field, beyond the state of the art.

Argument & Computation

In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance ... more In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance of knowledge to store, query, and reason with. To use this knowledge, we must address two key general problems: first, the problem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck between forms in which the knowledge is usually expressed, e.g., natural language, and forms which can be automatically processed; second, reasoning with the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the knowledge. Given such complexities, it is labour and knowledge intensive to conduct policy consultations, where participants contribute statements to the policy discourse. Yet, from such a consultation, we want to derive policy positions, where each position is a set of consistent statements, but where positions may be mutually inconsistent. To address these problems and support policymaking consultations, we consider recent automated techniques in natural language processing, instantiating arguments, and reasoning with the arguments in argumentation frameworks. We discuss application and "bridge" issues between these techniques, outlining a pipeline of technologies whereby: expressions in a controlled natural language are parsed and translated into a logic (a literals and rules knowledge base), from which we generate instantiated arguments and their relationships using a logic-based formalism (an argument knowledge base), which is then input to an implemented argumentation framework that calculates extensions of arguments (an argument extensions knowledge base), and finally, we extract consistent sets of expressions (policy positions). The paper reports progress towards reasoning with web-based, distributed, collaborative, incomplete, and inconsistent knowledge bases expressed in natural language.

JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government

Preparing for change is increasingly core business for governmental organizations. The networked ... more Preparing for change is increasingly core business for governmental organizations. The networked society and the increasing connectedness of governmental organizations have as much impact on the complexity of the change process as the complexities of the corpus of law. Change is not only driven by changes in the law; changes in the organization’s environment often create a need to redesign business processes, reallocate roles and responsibilities, and reorder tasks. Moreover, preparations for change are not limited to the internal processes and systems of these organizations. Propagation of changes to network partners and redesign of network arrangements can be an enormous challenge. In the AGILE project, we develop a design method, distributed service architecture, and supporting tools that enable organizations - administrative and otherwise - to orchestrate their law-based services in a networked environment. This paper explains the Agile approach and describes some of its key pri...

The Leibniz Center for Law is involved in the project Digitale Uitwisseling Ruimtelijke Plannen (... more The Leibniz Center for Law is involved in the project Digitale Uitwisseling Ruimtelijke Plannen (DURP 1 ; digital exchange of spatial plans) which develops a digital exchange format for spatial regulations. For the researchers of the Leibniz Center for Law, having designed the META Lex XML schema (cf. Boer et al., 2002 and Boer et al., 2003) for 'regular' legal sources, involvement in the DURP project offers new possibilities to study a legal area that hasn't yet been studied to the extent it deserves in the field of Computer Science & Law. The last few months we made an inventory of issues we feel are not sufficiently covered by current initiatives in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) field. This inventory is an input to the DURP standardization effort. In this paper we will also discuss the possibility of extending the Lex XML schema in order to support exchange of spatial regulations, including the associated geospatial information in the form of maps.

Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems Jurix 2006 the Nineteenth Annual Conference, 2006

Combining legal content stores of different providers is usually time, effort and money intensive... more Combining legal content stores of different providers is usually time, effort and money intensive due to the usually 'hard-wired' links between different parts of the constituting sources within those stores. In practice users of legal content are confronted with a vendor lock-in situation and have to find work-arounds when they want to combine their own content with the content provided by others. In the BSN project we developed a parser that enables the creation of a referential structure on top of a legal content store. We empirically tested the parsers' effectiveness and found an over 95% accuracy even for complex references.

The paper investigates the connection of the concept of affordance with the concept of institutio... more The paper investigates the connection of the concept of affordance with the concept of institution, fundamental in social sciences and in legal theory, with the purpose of delineating a working definition of social affordance. This hybrid concept enriches the representation tools to be used with agent-roles, knowledge components we use as basis in explaining and interpreting socio-legal scenarios. The paper shows how social affordances are of critical importance to model the agent-role embodiment mechanism.

The trend towards more online and interoperable governmental services and background processes in... more The trend towards more online and interoperable governmental services and background processes introduces challenges for trainers and educators working with governments. The immediacy and connectedness of electronic services and processes causes government actors to be more directly involved as organisers and managers of services and processes linking directly with citizens and business. Rapid of change brings a challenge to eGovernment actors and educators to bridge the resulting knowledge and skills gap. A group of universities and government trainers have developed and piloted a master class in eGovernment education addressing this problem. Latest methods, tools and content were used to allow assessment of best approaches and future directions. The master class was delivered to eGovernment trainers from government organisations in 10 countries, including 7 from Eastern Europe. This paper reports on that activity and its results.

Prenatal Diag, 2010

The knowledge management problems involved in managing the consequences of organizational change ... more The knowledge management problems involved in managing the consequences of organizational change processes triggered by changes in the law, for instance for business processes, services, databases, fielded applications, forms and documents, and internal education, make a good case for application of some state-of-the-art concepts in legal knowledge representation. The recently started AGILE project addresses the legal dimension of management of organizational change processes. This paper introduces the AGILE project, and presents an initial overview of relevant relations between sources of law and the business processes and services of the administrative organization, based on concepts familiar in legal theory and legal knowledge representation. It also proposes the application of change-oriented features of the MetaLex XML standard to organizational change.

Until recently he was head of a research department which coordinated development of knowledge ba... more Until recently he was head of a research department which coordinated development of knowledge based systems and research on the application of innovative technology. Van Engers is responsible for several research projects and advises several other projects. He is also the programme-manager of POWER. Dr. Patries Kordelaar works as consultant for O&I management partners on the domain of knowledge management. She wrote her Ph.D.-thesis on knowledge based law-supporting systems and coordinates the control aspects of POWER. Ing. Jan den Hartog M.Sc. is member of the POWER-project and wrote his M.Sc.-thesis on verification of a juridical domain. Ir. Erwin Glassée works for Application Engineers and is responsible for the development of the knowledge modelling method in POWER and is a certified Catalysis practitioner.

Scientific American, 2010

While the industrial sector has become a global market which has its influence on the production ... more While the industrial sector has become a global market which has its influence on the production processes, logistic chains etc., most administrative processes, either in governmental organisations, or in the commercial sector, haven't changed much since Weber's times. The channels that are used to exchange data between those administrations and their clients (including citizens and businesses) may have changed, but hardly any other fundamental changes have been successfully introduced. In this paper we argue that the very characteristics of the legal context in which these administrative processes take place require a specific information architecture and knowledge infrastructure. Based upon past experiences in building large scale knowledge systems e.g. for the tax administration, recent knowledge representation formalisms tested in an recent European project (Estrella) and experiences in recent large scale organisational innovation programme's both in the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration, the Dutch Immigration Service and the Ministry for the Environment and Spatial Planning amongst others, we developed an knowledge architecture that is better suited for administrative processes than the ones we encounter in daily practice. We will argue why our proposed architecture helps administrations to reduce their maintenance costs, and helps them to become more adaptive.

Eur J Oral Sci, 2009

Participative decision-making may promote the quality and the support of regulations. This also a... more Participative decision-making may promote the quality and the support of regulations. This also applies to regulations applying to a location. To date it has been very difficult for citizens to participate in legislative debates since this domain requires a level of expertise which is not widely available. Traditional approaches providing access to these regulations are not satisfactory to citizens since they are confronted with vast amounts of often contradicting regulations. Questions like "where will I be able to do this kind of activity" or "will this activity be allowed here" are hard to answer in traditional webbased service environments. There are many attempts to create one-stop-shop frontends to eGovernment, but these are seldom built from the perspective of the user. Developing more sophisticated visualization tools allows for a future in which legal planning is an important part of modern democracies. More accessible interfaces will mean that people can engage in a dialogue between interests, possibilities and regulative impact as a form of balanced system management rather than voting for or against a proposal set by experts. Improving the access to the legal planning process implies that legislation can become part of the democratic debate rather than the territory of experts. This article describes a number of prototypes that have been iteratively built and resulted in the Legal Atlas approach. Legal Atlas seems to provide the required supporting environment for public authorities that govern complex issues that require a participative policy-and decision-making strategy. The Legal Atlas system described here is designed to support INSPIRE environmental policy implementation. Qualified map layers and dynamic legal comparison using Simcity-like manoeuvrability can help to avoid conflict polarisation and result in conflict resolution.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

The paper introduces an agent architecture centered around the notions of commitment, expectation... more The paper introduces an agent architecture centered around the notions of commitment, expectation, affordance, and susceptibility. These components are to a certain measure at the base of any agent system, however, inspired by research in explanation-based decision making, this contribution attempts to make explicit and start organizing under the same operationalization neglected figures as negative commitment, negative expectation, etc.