Validation: the key concept in maintenance of legal KBS

ABSTRACT

When developing legal knowledge based systems one must continuously bear in mind one specific characteristic of law: constant change. This entails that the aspect of maintenance should receive attention. However, maintenance activities do involve risks for the consistency of the system as a whole. In order to avoid as much as possible the problems that occur when validating afterwards a model has been designed where validation is advanced as much as possible in the development process. By advancing validation the development track may be shortened. The quality of a system can be enhanced by means of automated devices (syntax module, consistency module, grammar module, graph module, rule module). During the validation phase this holds true for the representation. The advancing of the validation has been made possible by a program-code generator.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.1 Applications and Expert Systems
          Subjects: Law

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.4 MATHEMATICAL LOGIC AND FORMAL LANGUAGES
      F.4.2 Grammars and Other Rewriting Systems
          Subjects: Grammar types (e.g., context-free, context-sensitive)

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.6 Learning
          Subjects: Knowledge acquisition
      I.2.8 Problem Solving, Control Methods, and Search
          Subjects: Graph and tree search strategies

General Terms:
Design, Legal Aspects, Verification