There have been many such attempts (e.g. NKRL by Zarri et al., also funded by EU, not mentioned by the paper). There are even societies that have been dealing with such issues for many decades (e.g. http://www.iaail.org). The formalization of law and language is only one of the issues. Like many previous attempts, this one suffers from the fuzziness of human language. Fuzziness is not a drawback; it is what makes it possible to communicate efficiently in the first place. In order for us to communicate effectively, we need an enormous amount of tacit knowledge about our environment that our culture and life experience brings. If one tries to formalize the language, as in the present approach, one must also take this knowledge into account, down to the last detail (an "upper ontology" is by far not sufficient for this, and e.g. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc they have been working on a complete formalization for decades and are far from finished). And the tacit knowledge and also the moral valuation of the same change over time. And there are things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox which stand in the way of a complete formalization. And also works like those of Gödel or Wittgenstein showed the limits long ago.
At first glance, the paper seems to be written by competent people, but the 'related research' section is rather shallow. How is what the authors have developed more than "yet another language"?
I don't want to be too critical, though, it probably can't hurt to work on something new without dragging along all the baggage of the past. Still, it feels a bit strange from an academic perspective.
> it probably can't hurt to work on something new without dragging along all the baggage of the past
Ignoring a century of relevant research is not a recommended scientific approach though. The "baggage of the past" are rather the "shoulders of giants".
I mostly agree, but many scientific communities are rather self-centered/inward-looking, and when it comes to technological innovation like programming languages, it could be a reasonable compromise to align slightly more with a "mainstream" ecosystem and slightly less with the academic community. Of course, ideally, all design choices are compared to the community's state of the art, but this may be impractical if it implies a comparison to tens of obscure languages.
