An Interdisciplinary Methodology to Validate Formal Representations of Legal Text Applied to the GDPR

The modelling of a legal text into a machine-processable
form, such as a list of logic formulæ, enables a semi-automatic reasoning
about legal compliance but might entail some anticipation of legal interpretation
in the modelling. The formulæ need therefore to be validated by
legal experts, but it is unlikely that they are familiar with the formalism
used. This calls for an interdisciplinary validation methodology to ensure
that the model is legally coherent with the text it aims to represent but
that could also close the communication gap between formal modellers
and legal evaluators. This paper discusses such a methodology, providing
an human-readable representation that preserves the formulæ's meaning
but that presents them in a way that is usable by non-experts. We exemplify
the methodology on a use case where Articles of the GDPR are
translated in the Reified I/O logic encoded in LegalRuleML.