Dinesh, N., Joshi, J.K., Lee, I., and Sokolsky O. (2008). Reasoning about 
Conditions and Exceptions to Laws in Regulatory Conformance Checking. 
Presented at the Ninth International Conference on Deontic Logic in Computer 
Science (DEON'08), July, 2008.


Abstract: This paper considers the problem of checking whether an organization
conforms to a body of regulation. Conformance is cast as a trace checking 
question - the regulation is represented in a logic that is evaluated against 
an abstract trace or run representing the operations of an organization. We 
focus on a problem in designing a logic to represent regulation.

A common phenomenon in regulatory texts is for sentences to refer to others 
for conditions or exceptions. We motivate the need for a formal representation
of regulation to accommodate such references between statements. We then 
extend linear temporal logic to allow statements to refer to others. The 
semantics of the resulting logic is defined via a combination of techniques 
from Reiter's default logic and Kripke's theory of truth.