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.