AI Cards: Towards an Applied Framework for Machine-Readable AI and Risk Documentation Inspired by the EU AI Act

With the upcoming enforcement of the EU AI Act, documentation of high-risk AI systems and their risk management information will become a legal requirement playing a pivotal role in demonstration of compliance. Despite its importance, there is a lack of standards and guidelines to assist with drawing up AI and risk documentation aligned with the AI Act. This paper aims to address this gap by providing an in-depth analysis of the AI Act's provisions regarding technical documentation, wherein we particularly focus on AI risk management. On the basis of this analysis, we propose AI Cards as a novel holistic framework for representing a given intended use of an AI system by encompassing information regarding technical specifications, context of use, and risk management, both in human- and machine-readable formats. While the human-readable representation of AI Cards provides AI stakeholders with a transparent and comprehensible overview of the AI use case, its machine-readable specification leverages on state of the art Semantic Web technologies to embody the interoperability needed for exchanging documentation within the AI value chain. This brings the flexibility required for reflecting changes applied to the AI system and its context, provides the scalability needed to accommodate potential amendments to legal requirements, and enables development of automated tools to assist with legal compliance and conformity assessment tasks. To solidify the benefits, we provide an exemplar AI Card for an AI-based student proctoring system and further discuss its potential applications within and beyond the context of the AI Act.