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.
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Notes
- 1.
- 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.
See for a summary of different kinds of pluralism, Casanovas (2002).
- 4.
See Abel (1995:1): “When asked what I study, I usually respond gnomically: everything about the law, except the rules.”
- 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.
See the conception of “top ontology” developed by Hage and Verheij (1999).
- 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.
“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.
“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.
- 11.
See the Acknowledgments section.
- 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.
- 14.
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Universidad de León, and Universidad de Burgos.
- 15.
- 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.
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.
Versions 3.3.1, 3.4 (beta) and 4.0 (beta) were used.
- 19.
OPJK versions 1.0 and 2.0 have a DL expressivity of ALHIF+ and SHOIF, respectively.
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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.
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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
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