Modern software has been an integral part of everyday activities in many disciplines and application contexts. Introducing intelligent automation by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) led to break-throughs in many fields. The effectiveness of AI can be attributed to several factors, among which is the increasing availability of data. Regulations such as the general data protection regulation (GDPR) in the European Union (EU) are introduced to ensure the protection of personal data. Software systems that collect, process, or share personal data are subject to compliance with such regulations. Developing compliant software depends heavily on addressing legal requirements stipulated in applicable regulations, a central activity in the requirements engineering (RE) phase of the software development process. RE is concerned with specifying and maintaining requirements of a system-to-be, including legal requirements. Legal agreements which describe the policies organizations implement for processing personal data can provide an additional source to regulations for eliciting legal requirements. In this chapter, we explore a variety of methods for analyzing legal requirements and exemplify them on GDPR. Specifically, we describe possible alternatives for creating machine-analyzable representations from regulations, survey the existing automated means for enabling compliance verification against regulations, and further reflect on the current challenges of legal requirements analysis.

The annual International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML) is an international conference on research, applications, languages, and standards for rule technologies. RuleML is a leading conference to build bridges between academe and industry in the field of rules and its applications, especially as part of the semantic technology stack. It is devoted to rule-based programming and rulebased systems including production rules systems, logic programming rule engines, and business rule engines/business rule management systems; semantic web rule languages and rule standards; rule-based event-processing languages (EPLs) and technologies; and research on inference rules, transformation rules, decision rules, production rules, and ECA rules. The Ninth International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML 2015) was held in Berlin, Germany, August 2-5. The symposium was organized by Adrian Paschke (general chair), Fariba Sadri (program cochair), Nick Bassiliades (program cochair), and Georg Gottlob program cochair).

Event-driven automation of reactive functionalities for complex event processing is an urgent need in today's distributed service-oriented architectures and Web-based event-driven environments. An important problem to be addressed is how to correctly and efficiently capture and process the event-based behavioral, reactive logic embodied in reaction rules, and combining this with other conditional decision logic embodied, e.g., in derivation rules. This paper elaborates a homogeneous integration approach that combines derivation rules, reaction rules and other rule types such as integrity constraints into the general framework of logic programming, the industrial-strength version of declarative programming. We describe syntax and semantics of the language, implement a distributed web-based middleware using enterprise service technologies and illustrate its adequacy in terms of expressiveness, efficiency and scalability through examples extracted from industrial use cases. The developed reaction rule language provides expressive features such as modular ID-based updates with support for external imports and self-updates of the intensional and extensional knowledge bases, transactions including integrity testing and roll-backs of update transition paths. It also supports distributed complex event processing, event messaging and event querying via efficient and scalable enterprise middleware technologies and event/action reasoning based on an event/action algebra implemented by an interval-based event calculus variant as a logic inference formalism.

Rule-based policy and contract systems have rarely been stu died in terms of their software engineering properties. This is a serious omission, because in rule-based policy or contract representat ion languages rules are being used as a declarative programming language to form alize real-world decision logic and create IS production systems upon. This paper adopts an SE methodology from extreme programming, namely t est driven development, and discusses how it can be adapted to verificat ion, validation and integrity testing (V&V&I) of policy and contract sp ecifications. Since, the test-driven approach focuses on the behavioral a spects and the drawn conclusions instead of the structure of the rule base a nd the causes of faults, it is independent of the complexity of the rule lan guage and the system under test and thus much easier to use and understand f or the rule engineer and the user.

To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), 2008. We are researching the interaction between the rule and the ontology layers of the Semantic Web, by comparing two options: 1) using OWL and its rule extension SWRL to develop an integrated ontology/rule language, and 2) layering rules on top of an ontology with RuleML and OWL. Toward this end, we are developing the SWORIER system, which enables efficient automated reasoning on ontologies and rules, by translating all of them into Prolog and adding a set of general rules that properly capture the semantics of OWL. We have also enabled the user to make dynamic changes on the fly, at run time. This work addresses several of the concerns expressed in previous work, such as negation, complementary classes, disjunctive heads, and cardinality, and it discusses alternative approaches for dealing with inconsistencies in the knowledge base. In addition, for efficiency, we implemented techniques called extensionalization, avoiding reanalysis, and code minimization.