Action-Based Compliance Checking in Linked Data using SHACL

In recent years, a number of studies have demonstrated the use of Semantic Web standards such as OWL, SPARQL, and SHACL for legal knowledge management — and specifically for compliance checking.
Typically, these implementations either evaluate states or evaluate actions that are not specified for how their execution would change states.
The conceptual model can therefore be said to be static.
On the other hand, recent research in logic and law has seen a rise of proposals for dynamic or action-based logics to express legal norms.

At the intersection of these lines of research, we present the latest developments of Flint, a Semantic Web ontology for representing legal interpretations that is action-based.
Most notably, we present an implementation in SHACL of compliance checking based on Flint interpretations.
In an improvement over previous literature, our implementation is generic for any Flint model.
This allows users to concentrate on producing legal interpretations, hiding the complexity of SHACL.