2011 - Computational Law: a bridge towards the business rules One-day workshop

Computational Law: a bridge towards the business rules
One-day workshop in conjunction with ICAIL2011 Conference

Call for papers

Monday, June 6th,
University of Pittsburgh School of Law
3900 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh

Workshop Organizers:
Michael Genesereth, Stanford University
Guido Governatori The University of Queensland, Australia
Monica Palmirani, CIRSFID, University of Bologna

Motivation and Background:
Computational law is an approach to automated legal reasoning focusing on semantically rich laws, regulations, contract terms, and business rules in the context of electronically mediated actions. Current computational tools for electronic commerce fall short of the demands of business, organizations, and individuals conducting complex transactions over the web. However, the growth of semantic data in the world of electronic commerce and online transactions, coupled with grounded rulesets that explicitly reference that data, provides a setting where applying automated reasoning to law can yield fruitful results, reducing inefficiencies, enabling transactions and empowering individuals with knowledge of how laws affect their behaviour.

The cross-jurisdictional, inter-organisational, and collaborative nature of business today requires that organizations have more transparent view of data, information and processes of their partners. Considering that contracts and secondary regulation are key governing mechanism for defining interactions and policy framework for cross-domain business and governance collaborations, this requires an almost instant access to and a more reliable and accurate view of the business contract data and technical regulations (law and act where are defined more procedurals and technical norms). In spite of this, contracts and regulation are still treated mostly as legal documents disconnected from other enterprise or government information systems and there is currently inadequate computable model for using contract and regulation information to manage cross-organisational interactions.

The first COMPLAW workshop will be held in conjunction with ICAIL2011 conference and the best papers from this workshop were published in a CUER.

Objectives:
This Workshop will provide a collaborative forum for the participants to exchange recent or preliminary results, to conduct intensive discussions on a particular topic, or to coordinate efforts between representatives of a technical community in the area of Contract and Regulation modelling using computable models for capturing business procedures reusable in the information system in favour to the e-services. The program committee seeks papers and proposals that address various aspects of contracts and regulations, including enterprise modelling, e-business rules, procedural rules, formal and legal aspects with the aim of providing a balanced mix of presentations from these different perspectives.

The duration of the workshop is one day and this workshop will be held on June 6th 2011.

Topics:
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Contract and Regulations as a basis for coordination of cross-organisational interactions
System theoretic point of view Formalisms for expressing contracts and Regulations
Contract description languages for Contract negotiation and validation
Standards for capturing rules in contracts and regulations (e.g. RIF, Legal RuleML, LKIF, SBVR, etc):
Run-time contract monitoring and enforcement Standardisation
Systems Contract management requirements for specific contracts,
Standards/initiatives (e.g. Web Services, BPEL4WS, WS-CDL, tc)
Links between contracts, regulations, business processes and business
Services Practical experience with contract and regulations management systems Role
Submission Guidelines:
To enable lively and productive discussions, attendance will be limited to 25-30 participants and submission of a paper or a position statement is required. All submissions will be formally peer reviewed. Submissions should not exceed 10 pages in the Springer format and include the author’s name, affiliation and contact details. They should be submitted either as postscript or PDF files using the online submission system at

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=complaw...

Important Dates:
Workshop papers due: April 20th
Author notification: May 16th
Final papers due: May 31th
Workshop date: June 6th