An Ontology Based Approach for Regulatory Compliance of EU Reg. No 995/2010 in Greece

Illegal logging has always been considered as a major environmental and social global concern, as it is directly associated with deforestation and climate change. Nowadays, EU Regulation No 995/2010 has been successfully enforced to impede the placement of illegally produced timber within the EU market and therefore to efficiently enhance sustainable forest management and restore ecosystem balance. However, EU 995 regulatory compliance and enforcement itself is quite complex, since it requires long-term conformity, on a common basis for various heterogeneous groups and communities of stakeholders, in a global, even beyond EU, rule regulation framework. To make things worse, such a framework must be applied to the entire supply distribution chain and a wide variety of wood products, ranging from paper pulp to solid wood and flooring. Hence, in such complex and multivariate information environments, an ontological approach can more efficiently support regulatory compliance and knowledge management, due to its openness and richness of semantics for representing, analyzing, interpreting and managing such kind of information. In this paper, a rule-based regulatory compliance ontology is proposed, which fully captures EU Regulation No 995/2010 concepts and compliance rules and guidelines, as well as Greek legislations governing wood trade. The proposed ontology can be the basis for a computerized system providing automated support for illegal wood trade and monitoring EU regulation information provision and audit information storage and analysis.