Ontology-Based Legal System in Multi-agents Systems

Abstract

The development of ontologies associated with multi-agent systems provides mechanisms to model and correlate knowledge about the world to agent applications in various domains where simulations involve agents perform social exchanges or resource consumption. Norms that restrict and guide behavior often regulate the actions of agents, and therefore research on normative systems is necessary. Questions about the definition and construction of legal ontologies have been discussed in this research context. Legal ontologies have been proposed to formulate how laws can be modeled to formalize and manage law information in legal systems about regulation like traffic, taxes and other administrative rules. These ontologies have in their modeling formal laws with the purpose of providing information about permission, prohibition, obligation, rewards and punishments for these agents. Firstly, this article presents and discusses researches on ontologies applied in multi-agent systems, more specifically on legal ontologies. Next, we propose a model of legislative ontology related to the Brazilian domain of laws. The ontology of this model is provided by a web service and applied in multi-agent systems through a middleware. We used as a case study the Brazilian legislation that regulates fishing activity in an example scenario where the components simulate the restrictions for fishermen and government agents. Finally, we present how agent actions can be verified on our model and their applicability to the multi-agent systems.