In press • In RuleML+RR’25: Companion Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning, September 22–24, 2025, Istanbul, Turkiye
[en] Automated compliance checking of data (including financial data) against applicable law is only possible with a formal representation of complex legal rules. The literature in the fields of legal informatics and Requirements Engineering (RE) can count on decades of contributions to the representation of data models, rule languages, and
reasoners for legal application. There is however a representational gap between data and legal norms, which prevents a comprehensive approach to legal knowledge representation, resulting in the lack of a standard solution for legal rules representation. This paper reports on our experience regarding the formal representation of complex financial rules, more specifically, the entirety of Article 43 of the Luxembourgish UCITS Law. We used SPARQL to specify the rules to be used for the automatic validation of a real financial dataset. We provide observations regarding (a) the complexity of the resulting SPARQL queries and how SHACL can help address some of this complexity, and (b) the alignment of the rules/queries with the knowledge expressed by the corresponding legal statements. We discuss the implications of these observations and describe the main challenges in achieving a machine-readable representation of legal norms.
Research center :
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) > SVV - Software Verification and Validation
Disciplines :
Computer science
Author, co-author :
CECI, Marcello ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SVV
SANNIER, Nicolas ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SVV
ABUALHAIJA, Sallam ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SVV
BIANCULLI, Domenico ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SVV
HALLING, Michael ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance (FDEF) > Department of Finance (DF)
External co-authors :
no
Language :
English
Title :
When Data Stands Before the Law: an Experience Report on Representing Financial Rules in SPARQL
Publication date :
In press
Event name :
RuleML + RR Rule Challenge
Event place :
Istanbul, Turkey
Event date :
22-24.09.2025
Audience :
International
Main work title :
RuleML+RR’25: Companion Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning, September 22–24, 2025, Istanbul, Turkiye
This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), under
grant numbers NCER22/IS/16570468/NCER-FT and C24/IS/18894115/AGLAIA.
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