Abstract
Instead of custom-building a new ontology from scratch, knowledge resources can be elicited, reused and engineered to develop legal ontologies with the goal of promoting the application of good practices and speeding up the ontology development process. This paper focuses on the specificities of non-ontological resources in the legal domain, and provides some guidelines of how these can be reused and engineered to enable heterogeneous resources integration within a legal ontology. The paper presents some examples of these processes using a case-study in the consumer law domain.
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Notes
- 1.
Ontologies are the chosen artifact to support the integration of data from multiple, heterogeneous legal sources, making information explicit and enabling the sharing of a common understanding of a domain.
- 2.
A lexicon is the vocabulary of an individual person, an occupational group or a professional field, Glossary of Terms for the Standardization of Geographical Names, United Nations Group of Experts on Geographic Names, United Nations, New York, 2002.
- 3.
Regarding authoritativeness and bindingness, knowledge representation in the legal domain entails some peculiar features, because it is supposed that authority is somewhat embedded into the text.
- 4.
- 5.
Legal knowledge structures are constructed in a different way than scientific knowledge structures. Whilst the natural sciences only deal with persuasive authority, meaning that the truth of a proposition does not depend on who states it, but only if empirical data supports it and/or is internally consistent, the law deals with binding authority, that is, statements from a particular source whose truth depends on that source, and other formal aspects, such as the law having been promulgated or statement being part of a verdict ratio decidendi.
- 6.
Directive 2013/37/EU, CELEX:32013L0037.
- 7.
The EU Metadata Registry: The Metadata Registry registers and maintains definition data (metadata elements, named authority lists, schemas, etc.) used by the different European Institutions involved in the legal decision making process gathered in the Interinstitutional Metadata Maintenance Committee (IMMC) and by the Publications Office of the EU in its production and dissemination process.
- 8.
The Legivoc project, http://legivoc.org/.
- 9.
Council conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law, CELEX:52011XG0429(01).
- 10.
Council conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Legislation Identifier (ELI), CELEX:52012XG1026(01).
- 11.
A folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with an URI) for one’s own retrieval, T. Vander Wal. Folksonomy coinage and definition. 2007. http://www.vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html.
- 12.
Evaluation parameters consist in: (i) completeness of the legal concepts definition; (ii) correctness of the explicit relationships between legal concepts; (iii) coherence of the legal concepts modelisation; (iv) applicability to concrete use-case; (v) effectiveness for the goals; (vi) intuitiveness for the non-legal experts; (vii) computational soundness of the logic and reasoning; (viii) reusability of the ontology and mapping with other similar ontologies.
- 13.
Cfr. Point (iii) in Sect. 1.2 of the paper.
- 14.
- 15.
S. Peroni, “Grafoo,” http://www.essepuntato.it/graffoo/.
- 16.
LIME editor, http://sinatra.cirsfid.unibo.it/demo-akn/.
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Santos, C., Casanovas, P., Rodríguez-Doncel, V., van der Torre, L. (2018). Reuse and Reengineering of Non-ontological Resources in the Legal Domain. In: Pagallo, U., Palmirani, M., Casanovas, P., Sartor, G., Villata, S. (eds) AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems. AICOL AICOL AICOL AICOL AICOL 2015 2016 2016 2017 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10791. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00178-0_24
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