An Owl Ontology Set Representing Judicial

Semantic Knowledge Management

An iFAQ (intelligent Frequently Asked Questions) system designed to provide assistance to young judges at their first appointment is described. The development and use of legal domain ontologies is described. The functionality of the system is set out, along with the system architecture. The methodology and results of a system evaluation are also reported.

2008

Abstract. One of the most salient tasks in law is legal assessment, and concerns the problem of determining whether some case is allowed or disallowed given an appropriate body of legal norms. In this paper we describe a system and Protégé 4 plugin, called OWL Judge, that uses standard OWL 2 DL reasoning for legal assessment. Norms are represented in terms of the LKIF Core ontology, as generic situation descriptions in which something (state, action) is deemed obliged, prohibited or permitted.

Legal Information Retrieval, …, 2005

2005

Integrated Series In Information Systems, 2008

Since the emergence of the Semantic Web building ontologies have become quite popular and almost every conference on information science including artificial intelligence and e-Government have tracks that cover (legal) ontologies. Ontologies are the vocabularies that can be used to describe a universe of discourse. In this chapter we want to explain the roles (legal) ontologies play in the field of legal information systems and (juridical) knowledge management. We emphasize the fact that these ontologies are social constructs that can be used to express shared meaning within a community of practice and also have a normative character. Many different ontologies have been created for similar and different purposes and two of them, both core ontologies of law that specify knowledge that is common to all domains of law, will be explained in more detail. The first one, is a Functional Ontology for Law (FOLaw). This ontology describes and explains dependencies between types of knowledge in legal reasoning. FOLaw is rather an epistemological framework than an ontology, since it is concerned with the roles knowledge plays in legal reasoning rather than with legal knowledge itself. Nevertheless FOLaw has shown some practical value in various applied European ICT projects, but its reuse is rather limited. We will also explain some aspects of the LRI-Core ontology which captures the main concepts in legal information processing. LRI-Core is particularly inspired by research on abstract commonsense concepts. Legal knowledge is based upon these commonsense concepts. Since legal knowledge always refers to the 'real world', although in abstract terms, the main categories of LRI-Core are physical, mental and abstract concepts. Roles cover in particular social worlds. Another special category is occurrences; terms that denote events and situations. In this chapter we illustrate the use of LRI-Core with an ontology for Dutch criminal law, developed in the e-Court European project and an ontology for Dutch administrative law developed in a project for the Dutch State Council.

Second International Workshop on …, 2001

Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning, Faculty of Law, University of Edinburgh, john.zeleznikow@ed.ac.uk and Donald Berman Laboratory for Information Technology and Law, Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, La Trobe University, ...

Semantic Technology, 2018

The Internet and the development of the semantic web have created the opportunity to provide structured legal data on the web. However, most legal information is in text. It is difficult to automatically determine the right natural language answer about the law to a given natural language question. One approach is to develop systems of legal ontologies and rules. Our example ontology represents semantic information about USA criminal law and procedure as well as the applicable legal rules. The purpose of the ontology is to provide reasoning support to an legal question answering tool that determines entailment between a pair of texts, one known as the Background information (Bg) and the other Question statement (Q), whether Bg entails Q based on the application of the law. The key contribution of this paper is a clear and well-structured methodology that serves to develop such criminal law ontologies and rules (CLOR).

2011

Semantic Web, 2016

Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a more general understanding of law is bringing into view a new landscape in which general legal frameworks-grounded in well-known legal theories stemming from 20th-century c. legal positivism or sociological jurisprudence-are made compatible with specific forms of rights management on the Web. In this sense, Semantic Web tools are not only being designed for information retrieval, classification, clustering, and knowledge management. They can also be understood as regulatory tools, i.e. as components of the contemporary legal architecture, to be used by multiple stakeholders-front-line practitioners, policymakers, legal drafters, companies, market agents, and citizens. That is the issue broadly addressed in this Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, overviewing the work carried out over the last fifteen years, and seeking to foster new research in this field, beyond the state of the art.

New Generation Computing, 2019

The internet and the development of the semantic web have created the opportunity to provide structured legal data on the web. However, most legal information is in text. It is difficult to automatically determine the right natural language answer about the law to a given natural language question. One approach is to develop systems of legal ontologies and rules. Our example ontology represents semantic information about USA criminal law and procedure as well as the applicable legal rules. The purpose of the ontology is to provide reasoning support to a legal question answering tool that determines entailment between a pair of texts, one known as the background information (Bg) and the other question statement (Q), so whether Bg entails Q based on the application of the legal rules. The key contribution of this paper is the methodology and the semi-automated legal ontology generation tool, a clear and well-structured methodology that serves to develop such criminal law ontologies and rules (CLOR).