Abstract
Legislation and case law are widely published on the Web as documents for humans to read. In contrast, this paper argues for publishing legal documents as Linked Open Data (LOD) on top of which intelligent legal services for end users can be created in addition to just providing the documents for close reading. To test and demonstrate this idea, we present work on creating the Linked Open Data service Semantic Finlex for Finnish legislation and case law and the semantic portal prototype LawSampo for serving end users with legal data. Semantic Finlex is a harmonized knowledge graph that is created automatically from legal textual documents and published in a SPARQL endpoint on top of which the various applications of LawSampo are implemented. First applications include faceted semantic search and browsing for 1) statutes and 2) court decisions, as well as 3) a service for finding court decisions similar to a given one or free text. A novelty of LawSampo is the provision of ready-to-use tooling for exploring and analyzing legal documents, based on the “Sampo” model.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
In Finnish mythology and the epic Kalevala, “Sampo” is a mythical artefact of indeterminate type that gives its owner richness and good fortune, an ancient metaphor of technology.
- 7.
Cf. homepage for more info: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/tools/sampo-ui/.
- 8.
Including, e.g., CultureSampo (2008) for cultural heritage, TravelSampo (2011) for tourism, BookSampo (2011) for fiction literature, WarSampo (2015) for military history, BiographySampo (2018) for prosopography, and NameSampo (2019) for toponomastic research. Cf. homepage: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/applications/sampo/.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
The ParliamentSampo system: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/semparl/en/.
References
Casellas, N., et al.: Linked legal data: improving access to regulations. In: Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2012), pp. 280–281 (2012). Association for Computing Machinery
Council of the European Union: Council conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) and a minimum set of uniform metadata for case law. In: Official Journal of the European Union, C 127, 29.4.2011, pp. 1–7. Publications Office of the European Union (2011)
Council of the European Union: Council conclusions inviting the introduction of the European Legislation Identifier (ELI). In: Official Journal of the European Union, C 325, 26.10.2012, pp. 3–11. Publications Office of the European Union (2012)
Frosterus, M., Tuominen, J., Hyvönen, E.: Facilitating re-use of legal data in applications-Finnish law as a linked open data service. In: Proceedings of JURIX 2014, Kraków, Poland, pp. 115–124. IOS Press (2014)
Hoekstra, R.: The MetaLex document server. In: Aroyo, L., et al. (eds.) ISWC 2011. LNCS, vol. 7032, pp. 128–143. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25093-4_9
Hyvönen, E.: Using the semantic web in digital humanities: shift from data publishing to data-analysis and serendipitous knowledge discovery. Semant. Web 11(1), 187–193 (2020)
Hyvönen, E., Tuominen, J., Alonen, M., Mäkelä, E.: Linked data Finland: a 7-star model and platform for publishing and re-using linked datasets. In: Presutti, V., Blomqvist, E., Troncy, R., Sack, H., Papadakis, I., Tordai, A. (eds.) ESWC 2014. LNCS, vol. 8798, pp. 226–230. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11955-7_24
Ikkala, E., Hyvönen, E., Rantala, H., Koho, M.: Sampo-UI: A Full Stack JavaScript Framework for Developing Semantic Portal User Interfaces (2020). https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/publications/2020/ikkala-et-al-sampo-ui-2020.pdf. Submitted
Oksanen, A., Tamper, M., Tuominen, J., Hietanen, A., Hyvönen, E.: ANOPPI: a pseudonymization service for Finnish court documents. In: Proceedings of JURIX 2019, Madrid, Spain, pp. 251–254. IOS Press (2019)
Oksanen, A., Tuominen, J., Mäkelä, E., Tamper, M., Hietanen, A., Hyvönen, E.: Semantic finlex: transforming, publishing, and using Finnish legislation and case law as linked open data on the web. In: Peruginelli, G., Faro, S. (eds.) Knowledge of the Law in the Big Data Age, Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, vol. 317, pp. 212–228. IOS Press (2019)
Sarsa, S.: Information retrieval with Finnish case law embeddings. Master’s thesis, University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science (2019)
Sarsa, S., Hyvönen, E.: Searching case law judgements by using other judgements as a query. In: Proceedings of the 9th Conference Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language. AINL 2020, Helsinki, Finland, 7–9 October 2020. Springer-Verlag (2020)
Tamper, M., Oksanen, A., Tuominen, J., Hietanen, A., Hyvönen, E.: Automatic annotation service APPI: named entity linking in legal domain. In: Proceedings of ESWC 2020, Posters and Demos. LNCS, vol. 12124, pp. 208–213. Springer, Heidelberg (2020)
Tunkelang, D.: Faceted Search. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, San Rafae (2009)
Van Aggelen, A., Hollink, L., Kemman, M., Kleppe, M., Beunders, H.: The debates of the European parliament as linked open data. Semant. Web 8(2), 271–281 (2017)
Acknowledgments
Our work was funded by the Ministry of Justice; CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland, provided computational resources for the work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hyvönen, E. et al. (2020). Publishing and Using Legislation and Case Law as Linked Open Data on the Semantic Web. In: Harth, A., et al. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2020 Satellite Events. ESWC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12124. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62327-2_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62327-2_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62326-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62327-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)