Legal RDF

Legal RDF

Introduction to Legal RDF

Legal-RDF was a non-profit organization that was sponsored by software companies and by John McClure, main creator of Legal RDF ontology. It was one of the most significant non-institutional initiatives in the field of legal standardization

Legal-RDF was structured so that events relate to the state of a resource. For example an instance that is a ModifiedThing is one having a ModificationEvent property.

The second versión of the ontology was documented in a Wiki (now disappeared) to encourage the participation of an interested community during its development. The first version of Legal RDF, at the Legal-RDF.org website, was improved in Version 2 with the adoption of a better class- and property-naming guideline; with the refactoring of base/derived classes; and withthe definition of more complete data models.

“Legal-RDF.org1 publishes a practical ontology that models both the layout and content of a document and metadata about the document; these have been built using data models implicit within the HTML, XSL, and Dublin Core dialects….To facilitate devel opment of generic tools, all data and object properties defined in the ontology’s models are categorized as a subproperty of one of the 15 Dublin Core properties; …. Legal-RDF’s numeric properties derive from the ISO Systeme Internationale measurement systems; algebraic properties derive from XML Schema datatypes; language and currency designations are based upon relevant ISO standards; and time-zone designations are based on a review of local and regional standards (with some modifications necessary to eliminate collisions between the names of these properties and ISO standards). In addition to classes that represent quantities, classes are included that represent qualities that may be used to subtype or otherwise characterize instances.”(1).

Vision of Legal RDF

…”within the legal community, the Internet has had its greatest impact improving the process of rendering legal services by government and legal firms. The Internet provides e-mail for faster and more certain communications; electronic document filing for faster and more certain document submissions; and websites for disseminating information concerning one’s legal services, one’s legal and administrative staff, and one’s publicly-available documents.

To date, the content of legal documents has been represented as either a simple stream of text, or as a non-interpretable PDF image. The next, inevitable, step is to identify the type and meaning of the content in legal documents, thereby exposing this information to the numerous reasoning tools emerging from the Semantic Web community. Advancing in this direction, the legal community will lower its costs; improve the quality of its services; and create an environment conducive to mass-customization of legal products.

The Semantic Web is a disruptive technology in this sense for the legal industry. Firms can grow significantly by fielding products that cater to the needs of clients who ordinarily would not pursue legal advice. Reasoning-based software offers opportunities to provide these clients a level of service with an acceptable level of risk.

Therefore the strategy of the Legal-RDF community is to construct two databases — a comprehensive open-source ontology that is then applied in structured descriptions of statutory and administrative codes. These databases are then leveraged by the Semantic Web community to create the reasoning software envisioned for orderly industry growth.

Specifically underlying this strategy is the cognition that functional requirements that apply to many legal documents (e.g., to contracts and wills) are nearly identical to those in legal statutes. Benefits will powerfully ripple through the entire community if relevant software is applicable equally to both domains. Consequently, development of a contracts-related ontology, separate from or preceding a statutes-related ontology, is undesirable from economic, social, and legal perspectives.

The Semantic Web is also disruptive to the legal community (indeed, to the entire computing community) in that as XHTML documents are annotated with terms from the Legal-RDF vocabularies, or as a Legal-RDF represention of a non-XHTML document is created, one is essentially creating an un-structured database within the document; such a travelling database can then be queried far more precisely than conventional text-indexing software, resulting in significant benefits for document management activities within the firm. In short, “travelling databases”are certain to save firms money and time preparing legal cases, and when performing legal due diligence during economic transactions.

These two Semantic Web databases offer other intriguing possibilities. Legal-RDF’s structured descriptions of legal codes can provide a foundation for software that (a) inserts links to statute citations into XHTML (and PDF and Word) documents; (b) validates the content of legal documents; and (c) compares statutes across jurisdictions. Also, the Legal-RDF ontology itself can be the basis for cost-saving automated client interviews.

Finally, the simple fact that a legal document (e.g., a contract), can use the Legal-RDF ontology to identify key text strings, means that that information can be mechanically extracted, validated, and transferred to a structured database (e.g., a contract management system), thereby saving the costs and errors associated with usual manual methods.” (2)

Resources

Notes and References

  1. The Legal-RDF Ontology. A Generic Model for Legal
    Documents, John McClure.
  2. hypergrove.com/legalrdf.org/index.html

See Also

      • EUR-Lex
      • AustLII
      • Thomas
      • Semantic Web and Law
      • Semantic Indexing and Law
      • XML Standards for Legislation
      • MetaLex
      • LegalXML
      • SDU BWB
      • Linked Data Principles to Legal Information
      • LexDania
      • NormeinRete
      • AKOMA NTOSO
      • CHLexML
      • EnAct
      • eLaw
      • LAMS
      • JSMS
      • UKMF
      • Estrella Project
      • Legal Ontologies
      • Artificial Intelligence and Law
      • CELEX
      • Free Access to Law Movement
      • Legal Information Institute resources

Further Reading

    • Bing, J., Schoenberg, M.G. 1994. Improving Regulatory Management: The Use of Information Systems. NORIS (96) II (Fourth version).
    • Bing, J. 2003. The Policies of Legal Information Services: A Perspective of Three Decades. Yulex 2003.Ed. L. A. Bygrave, 37-55. Oslo: Norwegian Research Centre for Computers and Law.
    • Boer, A., Hoekstra, R., Winkels, R. 2002. MetaLex: Legislation in XML. Proceedings of JURIX 2002:
    • Legal Knowledge and Information System, 1-10.
    • Boer, A., Winkels, R.., Hoekstra, R., van Engers, T. 2003. Knowledge Management for Legislative Drafting in an International Setting. Proceedings of JURIX 2003: Legal Knowledge and Information System
    • Kay, M.: XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0. Recommendation, W3C (Jan 2007), https://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xslt20-20070123/. Latest version available at w3.org/TR/xslt20
    • de Oliveira Lima, A., Palmirani, M., Vitali, F.: Moving in the Time: An Ontology for Identifying Legal Resources. Computable Models of the Law, Languages, Dialogues, Games, Ontologies pp. 71 85 (2008)
    • Palmirani, M., Benigni, F.: Norma-System: A Legal Information System for Managing Time. In: V Legislative XML Workshop. pp. 205 224 (2007)
    • Palmirani, M., Contissa, G., Rubino, R.: Fill the gap in the legal knowledge modelling. In: proceeding of RuleML 2009. pp. 305 314 (2009)
    • Presutti, V., Gangemi, A.: Content ontology design patterns as practical building blocks for web ontologies. In: ER2008. Barcelona, Spain. (2008)
    • Valentina Presutti et al.: A Library of Ontology Design Patterns. NeOn project deliverable D2.5.1. (2008)
    • Biagioli, C. and Francesconi, E. (2005). A semantics-based visual framework for planning a new bill. In Proceedings of the Jurix Conference: Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.
    • Jérôme Fuselier et Boris Chidlovskii, Traitements Automatiques pour la Migration de Documents Numériques vers XML, in Document Numérique, vol 9/1 -2006.
    • Ovidiu Vasutiu, David Jouve, Youssef Amghar, Jean-Marie Pinon, XML based Legal Document Drafting Information System, 20th Aniversary Annual JURIX Conference, Workshop on Legislative XML, LIRIS, 12/2007
    • Data models for version management of legislative documents, Marà­a Hallo Carrasco,
      Journal of Information Science.
    • V. R. Benjamins, P. Casanovas, J. Breuker, and A. Gangemi, editors. Law and the Semantic
      Web: Legal Ontologies, Methodologies, Legal Information Retrieval and Applications.
      Springer-Verlag, 2005.
    • C. Lupo and C. Batini. A federative approach to laws access by citizens: The Normeinrete system. In R. Traunmuller, editor, Proc. Second International Conference on Electronic
      Government, Berlin, 2003. Springer.
    • Thomas F. Gordon, Guido Governatori, and Antonino Rotolo. Rules and norms: Requirements for rule interchange languages in the legal domain. In Guido Governatori, John Hall, and Adrian Paschke, editors, Rule Representation, Interchange and Reasoning on the Web, LNCS 5858, pages 282-296. Springer, 2009.
    • Long-term preservation of legal resources, Gioele Barabucci et al.
    • Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective, Kim Normann Andersen, ?Enrico Francesconi, ?Ake Grünlund
    • Arnold-Moore T ,’Automatically processing amendments to legislation’ (1995) in Proceedings of the International Conference of Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL’95).
    • Arnold-Moore T,.’Automatic generation of amendment legislation’ (1997) in Proceedings of the International Conference of Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL’97).
    • Arnold-Moore T, Information Systems for Legislation, Ph.D. Thesis, RMIT, 1998.
    • Australian Bureau of Statistics Press Release, 29 May 1999.
    • Barron D, ‘Why use SGML?’ (1989) 2 Electronic Publishing ? Organization, Dissemination and Design 3-24.
    • Bosak J and Bray T, ‘XML and the Second-Generation Web’ (1999) 280 Scientific American 89-93 < sciam.com/1999/0599issue/0599bosak.html>.
    • Campbell C and McGurk J, ‘Revising statutes with computer support’ (1987) 8 Statute Law Review 104.
    • Corbett M, ‘Indexing and searching statutory text’ (1992) 84 Law Library Journal 759-67.
    • Greenleaf G et al, ‘Public access to law via Internet: the Australian Legal Information Institute’ (1995) 6 Journal of Law and Information Science <austlii.edu.au/austlii/libs_paper.html>.
    • Hoey M, ‘The discourse properties of the criminal statue'(1988) in Walter (ed) Computer Power and Legal Language.
    • International Organization for Standardization, Information processing ? text and office systems ? Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) ISO/IEC 9979:1986.
    • Robertson J and Merrick F, ‘Proposal for participation in the Workshop on Hypertext Systems and Version Support’ (1994) in Durand et al Proceedings of the Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext Systems, 35-38. <ftp://bush.cs.tamu.edu/echt/vers-wkshp/VWReport.A4.ps.gz>.
    • Schweighofer E, and Scheithauer D, ‘The automatic generation of hypertext links in legal documents’ (1996) in Wagner and Thoma (eds) Database and Expert Systems (DEXA’96).
    • Tapper C, ‘Computers and Legislation’ (1970) 23 Alabama Law Review 1-42.
    • Travis B and Waldt D, The SGML Implementation Guide, 1995.
    • Editorial, ‘Textual amendment’ (1990) 11 Statue Law Review iii-iv.
    • U.K.Command Paper, The Preparation of Legislation (The Renton Report). Cmnd 6053, 1975.

     


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