Drafting and validating regulations: the inevitable use of intelligent tools

In this paper we describe first the nature of laws and regu- lations, which are not-normal, fragmented pieces of text, that can only be understood by using some (implicit) model about the world to be regulated. Then we describe the process of drafting regulations, in par- ticular the need to verify and validate their intended effects, i.e. deontic statements. We present an ontology, FOLaw, [13] and a prototype sys- tem, TRACS (Traffic Regulation Automation and Comparison System), which was created to test new traffic regulations [2]. Even a few runs of tests showed major deficiencies in this regulation. An extended version of TRACS also enables the generation of paraphrases of regulation, and even to some extent, from scratch. The implication of the use of these kind of tools are discussed; not only for checking consistency, but also for aligning (“harmonizing”) regulations of different legal systems (nations).