Ontologies and Legal Knowledge-Based Systems Development

2020

The article discusses the features of legal knowledge ontology creation. It is determined that ontology is the most appropriate way to describe legal knowledge. The particular qualities of legal information and the features of the language of a right were investigated. A review of legal knowledge ontologies that are used in various branches of law was made. The properties of legal information and the requirements for regulatory documentation in Ukraine were described. The formalization of the structure of the ontology database was presented, taking into account the required attributes of the concepts. The methodology of the work with the knowledge base was proposed to use the independent work of many users. The legal knowledge ontology at the law university was filled by all users of the software package, but experts checked the quality of this content. Crowdsourcing was considered as the main technique of the ontology filling process. Several branches of the ontology of legal knowl...

1998

There is a growing interest in how people conceptualise the legal domain for the purpose of legal knowledge systems. In this paper we discuss four such conceptualisations (referred to as ontologies): McCarty's language for legal discourse, Stamper's norma formalism, Valente's functional ontology of law, and the ontology of Van Kralingen and Visser. We present criteria for a comparison of the ontologies and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the ontologies in relation to these criteria.

Expert Systems with Applications, 2019

Over the last 30 years, AI & Law has provided breakthroughs in studies involving case-based reasoning, rule-based reasoning, information retrieval and, most recently, conceptual models for knowledge representation and reasoning, known as Legal Ontologies. Ontologies have been widely used by legal practitioners, scholars, and lay people in a variety of situations, such as simulating legal actions, semantic search and indexing, and to keep up-to-date with the continual change of laws and regulations. Given the high number of legal ontologies produced, the need to summarize this research realm through a well-defined methodological procedure is urgent need. This study presents the results of a systematic mapping of the literature, aiming at categorizing legal ontologies along certain dimensions, such as purpose, level of generality, underlying legal theories, among other aspects. The reasons to carry out a systematic mapping are twofold: in addition to explaining the maturation of the area over recent decades, it helps to avoid the old problem of reinventing the wheel. Through organizing and classifying what has already been produced, it is possible to realize that the development of legal ontologies can rise to the level of reusability where prefabricated models might be coupled with new and more complex ontologies for practical law.

1997

This article reports on a study into explicit conceptualisations of the legal domain, now widely referred to as (legal) ontologies. We compare two such ontologies, namely Valente's law functions and Van Kralingen and Visser's frame-based ontology. Both ontologies are intended to be (re) usable in the creation of legal knowledge systems. Our aim is to compare the ontologies, to assess their merits and thus, to contribute to future work on legal ontologies. We start by briefly discussing each ontology (section 2).

Law and the Semantic Web, 2005

2017

Computer and Law is a transdisciplinary research field, which has received increasing attention from researchers in the past twenty-five years (BenchCapon, T. et al, 2012). The problem of presenting the legal domain has been investigated in different perspectives by researchers, such as (Stamper, 1977), (Hafner, 1980), and (McCarty 1989), one of them is the ontological perspective. From NORMA proposed by (Stamper, 1991) to JudO ontology used in the Judiciary Framework proposed by (Ceci, 2013) and to LOTED2 proposed by (Distinto et al., 2014), ontologies have been used as a means of representing legal concepts. Specifically, there are some kind of ontologies called legal core ontologies (LCO), which represent generic legal concepts (e.g. legal norm, legal fact, and legal relation), usable in different legal domains. Some examples of legal core ontologies are: FBO proposed by (Kralingen, 1997), FOLaw proposed by (Valente, 1995), Core Legal Ontology (CLO) proposed by (Gangemi, 2007), a...

2005

Legal ontologies design raises knowledge management but also jurisprudence issues. To which extent is it possible to establish common concerns between technical means and theoretical constraints? After a brief presentation of the network methodology, we give two convergent results of our working groups on the feasibility of legal ontologies. First, the definition of a meta legal language handling fundamentals (acts, actors, conditions…) contributes to a shared understanding of legal knowledge between disciplines and jurisdictions. Second, ontological alignment concerns not only knowledge management but is also the core of the judge's activity.

Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Artificial intelligence and law - ICAIL '97, 1997

In this paper we discuss the role of explicit specifications of domain conceptualisations -now popularly called "ontologies" -in legal information systems. We describe the advantages that accrue from producing an ontology for such systems, as well as the ontologies so far developed which are directed at the legal domain. We then illustrate how taking an ontological perspective can give insight into what is common and what is disparate in apparently different approaches. We conclude by offering some findings as to the nature of ontologies for legal information systems, and some ideas concerning the creation of a library of legal ontologies.

Proce ed ings of LO AIT …, 2007