From Text to Executable Semantics: A Modular Ontology and SHACL Controls for University Intellectual Property Non-Disclosure Agreements in Colombia

Abstract

The management of intellectual property (IP) agreements in universities continues to rely on static legal documents that are signed, archived, and consulted when necessary, but whose content is rarely formalized to facilitate their operation and verification. Consequently, obligations, permissions, restrictions, deadlines, scopes, and exceptions often remain scattered across clauses drafted in natural language, annexes, emails, and different document versions, which hinders their monitoring and makes compliance review dependent on intensive legal and administrative work. In response to this limitation, this article proposes an ontology to formalize non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) at the University of Caldas, Colombia, understood as a specific case within the broader management of IP agreements. The proposal adopts a modular Semantic Web architecture composed of a reusable ontological core and a specialized profile for NDAs. Its construction followed the METHONTOLOGY methodology, and its specification was supported by Competency Questions (CQs), which were subsequently translated into SHACL constraints and SPARQL queries. In addition, a SKOS vocabulary is incorporated to normalize synonyms and terminological variants typical of legal drafting in Spanish, together with a lightweight weak supervision layer based on regular expressions, SKOS, and structural signals to support clause labeling and the batch generation of RDF instances. Thus, the proposal enables querying, traceability, and verification over NDA content, while offering a formal basis for progressing toward automatable controls and their eventual articulation with smart contracts.