Compliance Checking in the Energy Domain via W3C Standards

This paper investigates the use of W3C standards, specifically RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and SHACL, to automate legal compliance checking. We consider in particular in-force regulations for extracting oil and gas in Ghana to exemplify our proposed model. This paper models some selected norms from these regulations into a sample RDF ontology along with inference rules to check their compliance with respect to a given state of affairs. The paper’s main finding is that inferences enabled by OWL and SHACL shapes are not expressive enough to represent some existing legal requirements, specifically those imposing constraints on metadata about RDF individuals. To achieve the required expressivity, it is proposed that SHACL-SPARQL rules should be instead used.