Section: New Results

Regulation Engineering

Participants : Khalil Bouzidi, Catherine Faron-Zucker, Olivier Corby.

Regulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and involve more than one technical area, covering products, components and project implementations. They also play an important role in ensuring the quality of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact.

In a collaboration between CSTB and the I3S laboratory, we are carrying on research on the acquisition of knowledge from the technical and regulatory information contained in the REEF referential (http://reef.cstb.fr ) and the automated processing of this knowledge with the final goal of assisting professionals in the use of these texts and the creation of new texts.

We are applying this work in CSTB to help industrials in the writing of Technical Assessments. The problem is how to specify these assessments and standardize their structure using models and adaptive semantic services.

A Technical Assessment (in French: Avis Technique ou ATec) is a document containing technical information on the usability of a product, material, component or element of construction, which has an innovative character. We chose this Technical Assessment as a case study because CSTB has the mastership and a wide experience in these kinds of technical documents.

In 2012, we were particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived from the Technical Guides used to validate the Technical Assessment. These Guides are regulatory complements offered by CSTB to the various industrials to enable easier reading of technical regulations. They collect execution details with a wide range of possible situations of implementations.

Our work aims to formalize the Technical Guides in a machine-processable model to assist the creation of Technical Assessments by automating their validation.

Our first contribution is the use of standard SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules) and SPARQL to reformulate the regulatory requirements of guides on the one hand in a controlled language and on the other hand in a formal language

Second, our model incorporates expert knowledge on the verification process of Technical Documents. We have organized the SPARQL queries representing regulatory constraints into several processes. Each component involved in the Technical Document corresponds to an elementary process of compliance checking. An elementary process contains a set of SPARQL queries to check the compliance of an elementary component. A full complex process for checking a Technical Document is defined recursively and automatically built as a set of elementary processes relative to the components which have their semantic definition in the OntoDT ontology that we have designed.

Finally, we represent in RDF the association between the SBVR rules and SPARQL queries representing the same regulatory constraints. We use annotations to produce a compliance report in natural language to assist users in the writing of Technical Assessments.

As a result, we have designed a Semantic Web application to support and guide the process of writing Technical Assessment. The current version has allowed us to validate our approach. Also, we have developed a base of SBVR rules to describe business requirements of guides. This rule base is implemented in SPARQL.