Personalization of Legal and Ethical Information in ICT Platforms : The Approach of Legal Decision Tree

This paper aims at presenting a theoretical approach for the representation of legal and ethical information in a personalized way in ICT platforms. The personalization process allows us to adapt the legal information for endusers of ICT platforms. This approach points out the key element for defining a complete legal and ethical corpus of documents. Based on the corresponding scenario, the legal information is selected, filtered and then presented in ICT platforms. For organizating and analyzing this legal and ethical information, we reuse the existing notion of the decision tree and enhance it with a set of legal parameters emerging from legal documents. This legal decision tree will help us to treat different types of legal cases, which may relate to different service scenarios.


Introduction
While we are defining service scenarios (Note 1) of development an information and communication technologies (ICT) platform (Note 2), there are several actions that should be taken into account.These actions are required to guarantee that their related service scenarios must comply with several regulatory frameworks including legal and ethical issues as well as, the general standard and international norms (Imeri & Khadraoui, 2015).The intention of considering the legal and ethical issues is stemmed from the need of organizations to ensure more transparency while performing activities through their ICT platforms (Turki & Bjekovic-Obradovic, 2010).There are several recommendations to consider the scenario development by processing both the legal and ethical issues in an early stage of development by using a methodological approach in order to validate these scenarios (Imeri & Khadraoui, 2015;Imeri et al., 2016).Ignoring or neglect the legal and ethical issues may lead to project failure; therefore, the damage in market value could be considerable based on the previous experiences (Shazia & Governatori, 2010).
We propose hereafter a strategy, which initially allows us to explore and select legal and ethical sources, from which we can formulate a corpus of legal documents.This formulation of legal and ethical documents is based on a scenario description and represents a context in which there are several situations needed to be considered in order to provide a complete coverage of legal and ethical information (Note 3) (Bratcher et al., 2005).For covering all possible cases stemmed from a scenario situation context, we organize these legal and ethical documents (Note 4) in a form of a tree, which is based on the most highlighted parameters, e.g.work contract activity: as paid or unpaid, the age of a person, etc..The organization of legal and ethical documents allows us to explore any possible situation, which stems from the context of the scenario where the legal and ethical issues should be considered.Based on this tree-based structure, we can further make an analysis on legal and ethical documents, then personalize the legal and ethical information for each end-user by using technical components.This personalization is carried out based on the scenario context and end-user profile, by performing a matchmaking (Note 5) between them.The personalization process (Note 6) provides a content of legal information for end-users of ICT platforms.The content of information, which we offer by the personalization service, are "General Legal Rules", "Restrictions", "Obligations", "Recommendations" and "Precautions" and also the whole legal source to consider.This information showed to the end-users will be selected based on the context of scenario and the end-user profile matching, e.g .if the end-user has the age over 65, the content of legal information will be different with an end-user who has the age less than 65, and this is because of different legal issues to consider for this possible scenario.
Besides representing the structured legal information organized as legal rules, this approach enables to show all the legal documents related to a scenario.In this sense, it allows end-users of ICT platforms to explore the whole legal content.
Giving the significance of displaying the legal information in real time will facilitate the work of legal officers or even end-users in the decision-making process for any further action in ICT platforms.
The research presented in this paper is carried out for a real case development project in context of an European project in the domain of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)."This project aims at developing an ICT platform that allows posting, browsing and exchanging basic information between competence offering seniors and search-based requests, from competence demanding organizations from the public, private and voluntary sectors" (Imeri et al., 2016).
Furthermore, this paper is a continuous work from our last research paper (Imeri et al., 2016), whose intention was to propose a methodology for developing scenarios in compliance with legal and ethical issues.In this paper, we make a step forward by using another methodology approach that allows us to personalize the legal information for any possible activity of scenario and show this information for the end-users of an ICT platform in a real time.Based on the functionality of this ICT platform, we will use several scenarios in order to support our approach.This paper is organized as follows.Section 1 describes the context and the related work related to personalization process of the legal and ethical information.Section 2 presents our methodology approach for personalization of legal and ethical information.Subsection 2.1 introduces the process of gathering the legal and ethical documents, and Subsection 2.2 shows the organization of these documents.Subsection 2.3 continues with some technical component for developing personalization service based on legal decision tree approach, and Subsection 2.4 describes mainly the personalization mechanisms.Section 3 presents an example, which demonstrates the application of our methodology, and finally Section 4 shows conclusion and future works.

Related Work
Nowadays, the availability and utilization of legal information resources as determinants of legal professionals in the business environment.Actually, traditional contents (e.g. law books, legal periodicals, reference materials, legislation, etc.) were readily available to legal lecturers; however, E-resources and online legal databases were less available (Uluocha & Mabawonku, 2014).For this reason, there is an urgent need for the models and methods to integrate new digital resources into current information systems so that end-users of business systems can use this information in real time.
Research studies related to the integration of legal information into information systems can be classified into the following categories: artificial intelligence based, ontology-based, knowledge-based and location-based approaches.
Artificial intelligence-based approaches focused on the attempt of relating the different elements of a legal decision and then of constructing a framework for discussing legal information systems as a part of the decision process (Bing, 1984).Another approach of this category used the combination of symbolic and connectionist artificial techniques for legal information retrieval (Rose & Belew, 1989).
Ontology-based approaches used the ontology to deploy the legal information systems in order to facilitate the management, searching and sharing legal content (Gómez-Pérez et al., 2006).Ontologies can assure the role of explicit specifications of domain's conceptualisations in legal information systems (Bench-Capon & Visser, 1997).Some large and public ontologies, such as Wordnet, have also been used to build legal information systems that can fit the cross-lingual information retrieval needs of both legal professionals and nonprofessionals (Dini et al., 2005).
Knowledge-based approaches used different knowledge management techniques and tools to build intelligent legal information systems (Zeleznikow & Hunter, 1994).One approach of this category worked on the construction of intelligent legal decision support systems in discretionary domains in order to enhance consistent decision-making (Zeleznikow, J. (2000).Another approach focused on a basic unit of reasoning of a legal system that supports the construction of arguments and drafting of determinations in laws (Yearwood & Stranieri, 1999).Note 3 Legal and ethical information are issues of rights based on the legal frameworks (Bratcher, Farrell, Stevens& Vanderground, 2005).
Note 4 Any official document that contains legal or ethical information (ethical principles).
Note 5 Matchmaking is process of matching between two or more objects (Fernandez, Polleres& Ossowski, 2007).
Note 6 "Personalization is the ability to provide content and services that are tailored to individuals basedon knowledge about their preferences and behavior" (Hagen, Manning & Souza, 1999).
Figure 4 p term of service scenarios is refered in the context of business processes.Note 2 "Information and communications technologies (ICT) are distribution platformsfor providing public and private services, such as market information, financial services, education and health services", etc.. (Information Communications Technology for Development).