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CourtDocs Ontology: Towards a Data Model for Representation of Historical Court Proceedings

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Published:05 December 2023Publication History

ABSTRACT

For several decades researchers have studied legal documents for insights into the evolution of legal norms and strategies, in their social and cultural context. Analysing these documents and the associated legislative sessions, trials and court cases helps uncover hidden narratives and patterns, as well as showcase the lessons learnt. The field of knowledge engineering has contributed to the growing interest in the development and use of legal ontologies that aim at providing machine-readable foundations to model legal concepts, relations and processes. Legal ontologies have been used for legal knowledge management and as knowledge bases in legal knowledge systems. With a focus on the Wiedergutmachung project as a use case, this paper presents an overview of the existing legal ontologies, demonstrates the gap to align them with the essential conceptual framework required to model historical court proceedings with respect to provenance information, and presents the ongoing work towards developing the CourtDocs Ontology by utilising existing standards and ontologies on the intersection of the legal domain, history and archival sciences. The Wiedergutmachung project centres around constructing a knowledge graph as a backbone for information systems, based on historical archival records from the compensation procedure in post-World War II Germany.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        K-CAP '23: Proceedings of the 12th Knowledge Capture Conference 2023
        December 2023
        270 pages
        ISBN:9798400701412
        DOI:10.1145/3587259
        • Editors:
        • Brent Venable,
        • Daniel Garijo,
        • Brian Jalaian

        Copyright © 2023 ACM

        Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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        Publication History

        • Published: 5 December 2023

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