Skip to main content

Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Approaches to Legal Ontologies

Abstract

This paper shows the multiple relationships between empirical data and semantic content in the legal field. One of the well-known problems of ontology construction is the “knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem” pointed out many years ago by Edward Feigenbaum and others. This problem has not been completely solved in the next generation of Semantic Web developments. It is our contention that both an accurate description of the legal environment and well-grounded previous sociological studies may help to address it in a more satisfactory way. This means adopting a user-centered approach to legal ontologies, in what we will call an “iterative and integrated pragmatic cycle” involving legal theorists, socio-legal researchers, professional people (lawyers, magistrates, prosecutors…) and computer scientists. We describe the example of how the ontology of iuriservice was built up.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    See Friedman et al. (1995), and Abel (1995) for consistent readings on the field.

  2. 2.

    The legal field is defined, e.g., as “the ensemble of institutions and practices through which law is produced, interpreted, and incorporated into social decision-making. Thus, the field includes legal professionals, judges, and the legal academy.” (Trubek et al. 1994: 411)

  3. 3.

    See for a summary of different kinds of pluralism, Casanovas (2002).

  4. 4.

    See Abel (1995:1): “When asked what I study, I usually respond gnomically: everything about the law, except the rules.”

  5. 5.

    “What does exist and what can exist? What is the essence of things, and what the conditions of their existence?” (McCormick 1991: vii).

  6. 6.

    See the conception of “top ontology” developed by Hage and Verheij (1999).

  7. 7.

    See Fernández-Barrera and Sartor, Chapter 2, this volume, for a discussion of this perspective and the link between classical legal philosophy and the construction of legal-core ontologies.

  8. 8.

    “What is law? That is, what are the criteria of law? […] Law is a complex of interrelated components. Two kinds of component occupy a central position in this complex: norms and actions. There are also secondary components, that is, on the one hand, the legal values that justify and explain the norms and, on the other, the mental processes connected with our actions. Legal norms make up a system, and much theoretical literature deals with its structure […]” (Peckzenik 2005: 92–93).

  9. 9.

    “Law as a social system, that follows, is shaped by institutional supply rather than demand: by the infrastructure of legal services, by procedural conditions, by the costs and the ease with which the courts work and by how many alternatives to them are accessible” (Blankenburg 1991: 20).

  10. 10.

    Regarding institutions, technology and the judiciary, judicial and administrative contexts are shaped through the interplay between human beings, formal regulations, behavioral patterns and the technology at hand (Fabri and Contini 2001, 2003; Contini and Lanzara 2009).

  11. 11.

    See the Acknowledgments section.

  12. 12.

    “The practical implication of cognitive apprenticeship is to refocus instructional research on the design process itself: We should design computer systems in partnership with students, teachers, and practitioners in the context of use, so we can produce programs that people can afford and want to use, that promote creativity, and that relate in an honest, pragmatic way to everyday life” (Clancey 1992: 139).

  13. 13.

    Detailed information regarding this survey can be found at Ayuso et al. (2003) and Álvarez et al. (2005). Also Casanovas et al. (2004) includes some references to the data.

  14. 14.

    Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Universidad de León, and Universidad de Burgos.

  15. 15.

    The most up-to-date analysis of the data is contained in Vallbé (2009), although more information regarding the data and the results may be found in Casanovas et al. (2004, 2005).

  16. 16.

    Correlations among terms are based on similarity measures between objects within a dissimilarity matrix (Feinerer 2008). The search for correlations is carried out in the vector space computing the cosine between vectors interpreted as the normalized correlation coefficient (Manning and Schütze 1999)—with values between 0 and 1.

  17. 17.

    With Yoshikoder, the analysis of the document containing the full set of questions obtained an initial list 1,998 terms for the lemmatized text. To gather an initial more manageable set of terms, a threshold of 5 occurrences was established, 452 terms were obtained. AntConc obtained a similar list with 455 terms. The 455 list of terms from the AntConc analysis on the lemmatized corpus was manually revised to offer a first working set of terms, including a revision on multiple terms (N+Adj, N+prep+N, and N+prep+N+Adj forms).

  18. 18.

    Versions 3.3.1, 3.4 (beta) and 4.0 (beta) were used.

  19. 19.

    OPJK versions 1.0 and 2.0 have a DL expressivity of ALHIF+ and SHOIF, respectively.

References

  • Aakhus, M., A. Aldrich (2002). Crafting Communication Activity: Understanding FeliCity in ‘I wish I…’ Compliments. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 35(4): 395–425.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Abel, R.L. (Ed.) (1995). The Law & Society Reader. New York University Press, New York, NY.

    Google Scholar 

  • Abel, R.L. (1995). What We Talk About When We Talk About Law. In R. Abel (Ed.) The Law & Society Reader. New York University Press, New York, NY, 1–10.

    Google Scholar 

  • Almond, G., S. Verba (1963). The Civic Culture. Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

    Google Scholar 

  • Álvarez, R., M. Ayuso, M. Bécue (2005). Statistical Study of Judicial Practices. In V.R. Benjamins, P. Casanovas, J. Breuker, A. Gangemi (Eds.) Law and the Semantic Web. Legal Ontologies, Methodologies, Legal Information Retrieval, and Applications, LNCS, vol. 3369. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 25–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Amselek, P., N. MacCormick (Eds.) (1991). Controversies About Law’s Ontology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ayuso, M., M. Bécue, R. Álvarez, O. Valencia, R. Álvarez, M.L. Hernández, M. Santolino (2003, Septiembre). Jueces jóvenes en españa (2002). Análisis estadístico de las encuestas a los jueces en su primer destino (promociones 48/49 y 50). Análisis comparativo con jueces de mayor experiencia. SEC-2001-2581-C02-01/02 informe interno Report n.2, Consejo General del Poder Judicial [General Countrycil of the Judiciary].

    Google Scholar 

  • Bench-Capon, T.J.M. (2001). Task Neutral Ontologies, Common Sense Ontologies and Legal Information Systems, 2nd International Workshop on Legal Ontologies.

    Google Scholar 

  • Benjamins, V.R., P. Casanovas, J. Contreras, J.M. López-Cobo, L. Lemus (2005). Iuriservice: An Intelligent Frequently Asked Questions System to Assist Newly Appointed Judges. In V.R. Benjamins, P. Casanovas, J. Breuker, A. Gangemi (Eds.) Law and the Semantic Web. Legal Ontologies, Methodologies, Legal Information Retrieval, and Applications. Number 3369 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 205–222.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blankenburg, E. (1991). Legal Cultures Compared. In E. Blankenburg, J. Commaille, M. Galanter (Eds.) Disputes and Litigation, Oñati Proceedings n.12, IISJL, Oññanti, 11–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blankenburg, E. (1997). Patterns of Legal Culture: The Netherlands Compared to Neighboring Germany, Duitsland Institute, Universiteit van Amsterdam.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blázquez, M., R. Peña-Ortiz, J. Contreras, R. Benjamins, P. Casanovas, J.-J. Vallbé, and N. Casellas (2005, December). D10.3.1 Legal Case Study: Prototype. Sekt ist-2003-506826 Deliverable, SEKT, EU-IST Project IST-2003-506826, Intelligent Software Components S.A. (iSOCO) and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB).

    Google Scholar 

  • Casanovas, P. Dimensiones del pluralismo jurídico, IX Congrés d’Sntropologia FAAEE, Barcelona, 2002, available at http://www.ub.edu/reciprocitat/GER_WEB_CAS/Actividades/Actividades%20Simposio%202002/Ponencia-Casanovas.pdf (accessed 10/5/2010)

  • Casanovas, P., X. Binefa, C. Gracia, E. Teodoro, N. Galera, M. Blázquez, M. Poblet, J. Carrabina, M. Monton, C. Montero, J. Serrano, J.M. López-Cobo (2009a). The E-Sentencias Prototype: A Procedural Ontology for Legal Multimedia Applications in the Spanish Civil Courts. In P. Casanovas, J. Breuker, M. Klein, E. Francesconi (Eds.) Channelling the Legal Information Flood. Legal Ontologies and the Semantic Web, vol. 188. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 199–219.

    Google Scholar 

  • Casanovas, P., N. Casellas, J.J. Vallbé (2009b). An Ontology-Based Decision Support System for Judges. In P. Casanovas, J. Breuker, M. Klein, E. Francesconi (Eds.) Channelling the Legal Information Flood. Legal Ontologies and the Semantic Web, vol. 188. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 165–175.

    Google Scholar 

  • Casanovas, P., M. Poblet, N. Casellas, J. Contreras, R. Benjamins, M. Blázquez (2005). Supporting Newly-Appointed Judges: A Legal Knowledge Management Case Study. Journal of Knowledge Management, 9(5): 7–27.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Casanovas, P., M. Poblet, N. Casellas, J. Vallbé, F. Ramos, R. Benjamins, M. Blázquez, L. Rodrigo, J. Contreras, J. Gorroñogoitia-Cruz (2004, December (January 2005)). D10.2.1 Legal Case Study: Legal Scenario. Sekt ist-2003-506826 Deliverable, SEKT, EU-IST Project IST-2003-506826, Intelligent Software Components S.A. and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

    Google Scholar 

  • Casellas, N., J.-E. Nieto, A. Meroño, A. Roig, S. Torralba, M. Reyes de los Mozos, P. Casanovas (2010). Ontological Semantics for Data Privacy Compliance: The NEURONA Ontology, Intelligent Information Privacy Management. Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium, Stanford 23rd–25th of March 2010, Technical Report SS-10-05, 34–38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Casellas, N. (2008, December). Modelling Legal Knowledge Through Ontologies. OPJK: The Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge. Ph.D. thesis, Departament de Ciència Política i Dret Públic, Facultat de Dret, Bellaterra, Barcelona.

    Google Scholar 

  • Casellas, N., P. Casanovas, J.-J. Vallbé, M. Poblet, M. Blázquez, J. Contreras, J. M. López-Cobo, V. R. Benjamins (2007). Semantic Enhancement for Legal Information Retrieval: Iuriservice Performance. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. ICAIL 2007, June 4–8, Stanford Law School, California, 49–57. Association for Computing Machinery.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clancey, W.J. (1992). Representations of Knowing: In Defense of Cognitive Apprenticeship. Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 3(2): 139–168.

    Google Scholar 

  • Contini, F., G.F. Lanzara (Eds.) (2009). ICT and Innovation in the Public Sector. European Studies in the Making of E-Government. Palgrave, Macmillan, Houndmills.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fabri, M., F. Contini (Eds.) (2001). Justice and Technology in Europe: How ICT is Changing the Judicial Business. Kluwer Law International, The Hague.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fabri, M., F. Contini (Eds.) (2003). Judicial Electronic Data Interchange in Europe: Applications, Policies, and Trends. IRSIG-CNR, Lo Scarabeo, Bologna.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feigenbaum, E.A. (1977). The Art of Artificial Intellegigence: I. Themes and Case Studies of Knowledge Engineering. STAN-CS-77-621 Heuristic Programming Project Memo, 77–25.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feigenbaum, E.A. (1992). A Personal View of Experts Systems: Looking Back and Looking Ahead, Knowledge System Laboratory, Report n. 92-41 KSL, Stanford.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feinerer, I. (2008). tm: Text Mining Package (R package version 0.3-3 ed.).

    Google Scholar 

  • Fernández-Barrera, M., G. Sartor (2010). The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies, Chap 2, this volume.

  • Forsyth, D.E., B. Buchanan (1989). Knowledge Acquisition for Expert Systems: Some Pitfalls and Suggestions. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 19(3): 435–442.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, L.M. (1975). The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, NY.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, L.M., S. MacAulay, J.A. Stookey (Eds.) (1995). Law and Society Reader: Readings on the Social Studies of Law. Norton and Co, New York, NY.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, L.M., R. Pérez-Perdomo (Eds.) (2003). Legal Culture in the Age of Globalization. Latin America and Latin Europe. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gómez-Pérez, A., M. Fernández-López, O. Corcho (2003). Ontological Engineering. With Examples from the Areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web. Advanced Information and Knowlege Processing. Springer, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hage, J., B. Verheij (1999). The Law as a Dynamic Interconnected System of States of Affairs: A Legal Top Ontology. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 51 (6): 1043–1077.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jacobs, S. (2002). Maintaining Neutrality in Dispute Mediation: Managing Disagreement While Managing Not To Disagree. Journal of Pragmatics, 34: 1403–1426.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jackson, S. (1998). Disputation by Design. Argumentation, 12: 183–198.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Manning, C.D., H. Schütze (1999). Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA/London, UK.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin, D., M. Rouncefield, I. Sommerville (2002). Applying Patterns of Cooperative Interaction to Work (Re)Design: E-Government and Planning. In Proceedings of CHI 2002. Publications of the ACM, Minneapolis, MN.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin, D., I. Sommerville (2004). Patterns of Cooperative Interaction: Linking Ethnomethodology and Design. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, March 2004; 11(1): 59–89.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Milton, N. (2007). Knowledge Acquisition in Practice. A Step-by-Step Guide. Decision Engineering. Springer, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Noy, N.F., D.L. McGuinness (2001). Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology. Technical Report SMI-2001-0880, Stanford University School of Medicine.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peczenik, A. (2000). Scientia Juris. An Unsolved Philosophical Problem. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 3(3): 273–302.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peczenick, A. (2005). Scientia Juris. Legal Doctrine as Knowledge of Law and as a Source of Law. In A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and Legal Jurisprudence, vol. 4. Springer, Heidelberg, Berlin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Poblet, M., N. Casellas, S. Torralba, P. Casanovas (2009). Modeling Expert Knowledge in the Mediation Domain: A Mediation Core Ontology. In N. Casellas, E. Francesconi, R. Hoekstra, S. Montemagni (Eds.) Proceedings of 3rd Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques (LOAIT2009), Barcelona June 8, 2009, IDT Series, vol. 2, 19–28. (Available at: http://www.huygens.es/site/service4.html).

  • Poblet, M., P. Casanovas (2005). Recruitment, Professional Evaluation and Career of Judges and Prosecutors in Spain. In G. di Federico (Ed.) Recruitment, Professional Evaluation and Career of Judges and Prosecutors in Europe: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain. IRSIG-CNR, Lo Scarabeo, Bologna, 185–214.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schreiber, G., H. Akkermans, A. Anjewierden, R. de Hoog, N. Shadbolt, W.V. de Velde, B. Wielinga (1999). Knowledge Engineering and Management. The CommonKADS Methodology. A Bradford Book. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA/London, England.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sure, Y. (2003). Methodology, Tools and Case Studies for Ontology Based Knowledge Management. Ph.D. thesis, Fakultät für Wirschaftwissenschaften der Universität Fridericiana zu Karlsruhe.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sure, Y., C. Tempich, D. Vrandecić (2006). Ontology Engineering Methodologies. In J. Davies et al. (Eds.) Semanic Web Technologies. Trends and Research in Ontology-based Systems, Chichester, Wiley, 171–190.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tamanaha, B.Z. (2001). A General Jurisprudence of Law and Society. Oxford University Press, Oxford, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tiscornia, D. (2005). Multilingual Semantic Metadata for Law. In Quaderni CNIPA, 2005, 3rd Workshop on Legislative XML (Furore, 6–8 aprile, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  • Trubek, D.M. (1990). Back to the Future: The Short, Happy Life of the Law and Society Movement. Florida State University Law Review, 18(1): 1–55.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trubek, D.M., Y. Dézalay, R. Buchanan, J.R. Davis (1994). Global Restructuring and the Law: Studies of the Internationalization of Legal Fields and the Creation of Transnational Arenas. Case Western Reserve Law Review, 44(2): 407–498.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vallbé, J.-J. (2009, July). Models of Decision-Making: Facing Uncertainty in Spanish Judicial Settings. Ph.D. thesis, Departament de Dret Constitucional i Ciència Política. Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this paper has been developed within the framework of the following projects: SEC2001-2581-C02-01; FIT-150500-2002-562; FIT-150500-2003-198; EU-IST 2003-506826 SEKT; SEJ2006-10695; FIT-350101-2006-26.; FIT-350100-2007-161; TSI-020501-2008, 2008–2010; CSO-2008-05536-SOCI.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pompeu Casanovas .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Casanovas, P., Casellas, N., Vallbé, JJ. (2011). Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective. In: Sartor, G., Casanovas, P., Biasiotti, M., Fernández-Barrera, M. (eds) Approaches to Legal Ontologies. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0120-5_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics