Using Logic to Formalise Environmental Policies

Environmental policies aim to protect the environment and support the sustainable use of natural resources. These policies cover areas such as climate change, water quality, biodiversity, air pollution, the protection of marine and terrestrial ecosystems, etc. Many of these policies, including guidelines and regulations, exist only in natural language. Translating them into a machine-readable format is an interesting challenge, and enables applications such as automatically checking whether a construction project respects protected habitats. 

This thesis aims to formalise policies in one of these areas, e.g., migration and habitat use of deer when considering the construction of roads and barriers. The formalisation can be done using existing frameworks such as ODRL or, can be done more theoretically, using, e.g., Description Logic.