  Large documents written in juridical language are difficult to interpret,
with long sentences leading to intricate and intertwined relations between the
nouns. The present paper frames this problem in the context of recent European
security directives. The complexity of their language is here thwarted by
automating the extraction of the relevant information, namely of the parts of
speech from each clause, through a specific tailoring of Natural Language
Processing (NLP) techniques. These contribute, in combination with ontology
development principles, to the design of our automated method for the
representation of security directives as ontologies. The method is showcased on
a practical problem, namely to derive an ontology representing the NIS 2
directive, which is the peak of cybersecurity prescripts at the European level.
Although the NLP techniques adopted showed some limitations and had to be
complemented by manual analysis, the overall results provide valid support for
directive compliance in general and for ontology development in particular.
