Luigi Logrippo

Professor Universite du Quebec en Outaouais, Canada

In the areas of security, privacy and e-commerce, among others, there must be compliance of IT policies to the law. Societies of mobile agents are regulated by policy systems that will increasingly resemble legal systems. Hence the need of establishing a common framework between legal concepts and related IT concepts. It is argued that there are many concepts and methods in common between policy systems used in Information Technology and Jurisprudence, i.e. legal theory. These concepts are found in the research area of 'normative systems' which encompasses them and provides a framework for unifying research. It is further argued that advantages can be accrued to both research areas by favoring interchanges of methods and principles in this unifying framework. A distinction is made between norms in rule style and norms in requirements style. Issues of completeness, consistency and conflicts are considered. Concepts that are useful in this research area include defeasible logic and ontologies. Useful tools are theorem provers and model checkers. We will discuss the application of these ideas for verifying compliance between privacy laws and privacy regulations in organizations. The discussion will be in a broad historical and philosophical context.