Legal Ontologies

Note: for more information about legal ontologies, read the legal metadata website here.

Legal Ontologies are the expression of the metadata section of legal documents according to a formalized ontology language such as OWL. They have proved crucial for representing, processing and retrieving legal information,

“Legal ontologies differ from ontologies in other fields of practice, like medicine or engineering in that they have to cover a wide range of (mainly) common-sense con cepts that are part of physical, abstract , mental, and social worlds. Legal domains share complex and varied notions of norm and responsibility, but besides this legal “core” , a legal domain refers to some world of social activities.

This normative core has been traditionally the object of study in jurisprudence (legal theory). Particularly the work of Hohfeld (1919) is even at present an important source of reference and
inspiration. In its normative view, law is concerned with overt behaviour, but in as signing responsibility to individuals, mental concepts like inten tion and predictability play a crucial role… Moreover, as legal decisions have to be justified by reason (argument) and evidence, legal ontologies often also cover epistemological notions and issues, as is also visible in the core ontologies of Law proposed so far , e.g. Fundamental Legal Conceptions,… Language for Legal Discourse, Functional Ontology for Law, Frame-Based Ontology of Law, LRI-Core …, Core Legal Ontology.”(1)

“The core notions in regulatory, and especially legal, ontologies include: norm, case, contract, institution, person, agent, role, status, normative position (duties, rights, etc.), responsibility, property, crime, provision, interpretation, sanction, delegation, legal document.

To build and maintain legal ontologies, proper techniques and methods from ontology engineering have been used: conceptual analysis, knowledge representation, ontology modularization and layering, ontology alignment and merging, evolution and dynamics, multilingual and terminological aspects, etc.”(2)

“A core ontology is an ontology covering the most central notions in a domain of application.
We do not mention here the rich philosophical tradition, which only indirectly enters the
process of legal ontology engineering.”(3)

Semantic metadata

Note: read more about semantic metadata web and law here.

“In many countries public institutions have promoted projects aimed at improving the availability of Public Sector information on the Web and the free access of ‘institutional’ information. In the specific field of legal information there is a further need to join practical/technical solutions for accessing legal information1 with a further ‘social’ perspective of allowing citizen to access in an ‘understandable’ way legal, mainly legislative data.

Today conceptual search strategies based on keywords are still missing a clear semantics of terms, and this does not allow a conceptual query expansion; therefore, there is no semantic relationship between information needs of the user and the information content of documents, apart from text pattern matching. It is necessary, therefore, to explicit the semantic aspects carefully so that the search is driven by a metadescription, expressed trough semantic metadata, which keeps univocal
references to the text, since the non-expert user has no precise idea of what he is looking for, and uses general terms of common language rather than specific legal concepts.

Semantic metadata are expected to support search engines for legal information retrieval, providing legal knowledge to include into their search strategies. In a wide meaning, semantic metadata are ‘all kind of information describing a resource’: this paper focuses on a strict notion of semantic metadata referring to ‘information about content’, i.e.: what the resource is about. In general standard frameworks such as Dublin Core, this kind of information is expressed by the metadata Subject, which carries at least one preferred term from sources as controlled vocabularies or encoding schemes, usually defined as hierarchies of terms, usually lacking a purely defined semantics. A descriptive model of contents may point out both the typologies of regulative functions and the categories of the addressees, and it would allow to overcome.”(4)

Tools for Lexical Ontologies

Thesauri

For more information about Thesauri and other vocabuliaries in the legal field, visit this site.

“The types of vocabulary for which software tools should provide support include thesauri …., classification schemes of various types, subject heading lists, taxonomies (typically combining the
hierarchical properties of classification schemes with the reciprocal relationships and other features of thesauri) and simple authority lists. […] While a taxonomy is designed to classify things, a thesaurus is designed to help you find the right words or phrases to describe what you are
ultimately looking for.” (5)

Ontologies

“Ontologies are designed to allow computers to really interact with each other, covering all semantic metadata in its wider meaning(e.g.: publication date, authors of paper, journal publishers, publication date, normative references, etc.). On one hand, ontologies can be machine generated from good metadata; on the other, here exposed, good ontologies can enrich semantic metadata.”(6)

Resources

Notes and References

1. Law and the Semantic Web: Legal Ontologies, Methodologies, Legal Information Retrieval and Applications, Richard Benjamins
2. Idem
3. Idem
4. The Lois Project: Lexical Ontologies for Legal Information Sharing, Daniela Tiscornia
5. e-Government Unit of the UK Cabinet Office
6. Idem 4

See Also

• Semantic Web and Law
• Semantic Indexing and Law
• MetaLex
• SDU BWB
• LexDania
• NormeinRete
• AKOMA NTOSO
• CHLexML
• EnAct
• Legal RDF
• eLaw
• LAMS
• JSMS
• UKMF
• Estrella Project
• Artificial Intelligence and Law
• LegalXLM
• CELEX
• Linked Data Principles to Legal Information
• Legal concepts
• Moys Classification and Thesaurus for Legal Materials
• International legal sources of information
• Free Access to Law Movement
• Legal Information Institute resources

Further Reading

• Arnold-Moore, T. (1997). Automatic generation of amendment legislation. In Proceedings of the International Conference of Artificial Intelligence and Law.
• Lachmayer, F. and Hoffmann, H. (2005). From legal categories towards legal ontologies. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, pages 63-69.
• Palmirani, M. (2005). Time model in normative information system. In Post-proceedings of the ICAIL Workshop on the Role of Legal Knowledge in e-Government.
• Visser , R.S.P. , Bench-Capon, T.J.M.: Ontologies in the Design of Legal Knowledge Sys- tems. Towards a Library of Legal Domain Ontologies. First International Workshop on Legal Ontologies, Melbourne Law School, Victoria (1997) 47.
• Visser, R.S. P., Bench-Capon , T.J.M.: A Comparison of Four Ontologies for the Design of Legal Knowledge Systems. Artificial Intelligence and Law 6 (1998)
• Gangemi, A., Breuker J.: Section 5. Harmonizing Legal Ontologies. In: Deliverable 3.4. Harmonisation perspectives of some promising content standards. Ontoweb SIG on Content Standards Legal Ontologies Working Group, Project IST-2000-29243 (2002)
• Doerr, M., Hunter, J., Lagoze, C., (2003) Towards a Core Ontology for Information
  Integration, in Journal of Digital Information, Volume 4 Issue 1, 2003
• Fellbaum, C. (ed.) (1998). WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press,
  Cambridge, Mass.
• Gangemi, A., Guarino, N., Masolo, C., Oltramari, A., Schneider, L. (2002),
  Sweetening Ontologies with DOLCE. In: Proceedings of EKAW 2002.
• Kalinowsky, G. (1965). Introduction à la logique juridique. Pichon & Durand-Auzias,
  Paris.
• Gangemi, A, M.-T. Sagri, D. Tiscornia (2003). Jur-Wordnet, a Source of Metadata
  for Content Description in Legal Information. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on
  ‘Legal Ontologies & Web based legal information management’, part of The International
  Conference of Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2003), Edinburgh,
  June 24, 2003.
• Boris Lauser, AGROVOC: From thesaurus to Ontology Transforming Agrovoc into
  a KAON ontology, Agrovoc Workshop, Rome 2003.
• Sacco, R., Lingua e diritto, in Ars Intrepretandi, Annuario di ermeneutica giuridica,
  traduzione e diritto, Milano, 2000.
• Vossen, P., Peters, W. & Dà­ez-Orzas, P. (1997). ‘The Multilingual design of the
  EuroWordNet Database. In: Mahesh, K. (ed.), Ontologies and multilingual NLP,
  Proceedings of IJCAI-97 workshop, Nagoya, Japan, August 23-29.