Abstract
Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in legal ontologies and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
References
Athan T, Governatori G, Palmirani M, Paschke A, Wyner A (2015) Legalruleml: design principles and foundations. In: Reasoning web international summer school. Springer, Berlin, pp 151–188
Bartolini C, Muthuri R, Santos C (2015) Using ontologies to model data protection requirements in workflows. In: JSAI international symposium on artificial intelligence. Springer, Berlin, pp 233–248
Bartolini C, Giurgiu A, Lenzini G, Robaldo L (2016) Towards legal compliance by correlating standards and laws with a semi-automated methodology. In: Benelux conference on artificial intelligence. Springer, Berlin, pp 47–62
Breuker J, Hoekstra R (2004) Epistemology and ontology in core ontologies: FOLaw and LRI-Core, two core ontologies for law. In: Proceedings of the EKAW04 workshop on core ontologies in ontology engineering. Northamptonshire, UK, pp 15–27
Casellas N (2011) Legal ontology engineering: methodologies, modelling trends, and the ontology of professional judicial knowledge, vol 3. Springer, Berlin
de Oliveira Rodrigues CM, de Freitas FLG, Barreiros EFS, de Azevedo RR, de Almeida Filho AT (2019) Legal ontologies over time: a systematic mapping study. Expert Syst Appl 130:12–30
Distinto I, d’Aquin M, Motta E (2016) LOTED2: an ontology of european public procurement notices. Semant Web 7(3):267–293
ELI Task Force (2018) ELI implementation methodology: good practices and guidelines. Publications Office
Gandon F, Governatori G, Villata S (2017) Normative requirements as linked data. In: The 30th international conference on legal knowledge and information systems (JURIX 2017)
Gangemi A, Presutti V (2009) Ontology design patterns. In: Handbook on ontologies. Springer, Berlin, pp 221–243
Gangemi A, Sagri M-T, Tiscornia D (2005) A constructive framework for legal ontologies. In: Law and the semantic web. Springer, Berlin, pp 97–124
Haapio H, Hagan M (2016) Design patterns for contracts. In: Networks. Proceedings of the 19th international legal informatics symposium IRIS, pp 381–388
Haapio H, Hagan M, Palmirani M, Rossi A (2018) Legal design patterns for privacy. In: Data protection/LegalTech. Proceedings of the 21th international legal informatics symposium IRIS, pp 445–450
Hoekstra R, Breuker J, Di Bello M, Boer A et al (2007) The LKIF core ontology of basic legal concepts. LOAIT 321:43–63
Muñoz-Soro JF, Esteban G, Corcho O, Serón F (2016) PPROC, an ontology for transparency in public procurement. Semant Web 7(3):295–309
Oltramari A, Piraviperumal D, Schaub F, Wilson S, Cherivirala S, Norton TB, Russell NC, Story P, Reidenberg J, Sadeh N (2018) PrivOnto: a semantic framework for the analysis of privacy policies. Semant Web, (Preprint), pp 1–19
Palmirani M, Governatori G, Rotolo A, Tabet S, Boley H, Paschke A (2011) Legalruleml: Xml-based rules and norms. In: Rule-based modeling and computing on the semantic web. Springer, Berlin, pp 298–312
Palmirani M, Martoni M, Rossi A, Bartolini C, Robaldo L (2018) Pronto: privacy ontology for legal reasoning. In: International conference on electronic government and the information systems perspective. Springer, Berlin, pp 139–152
Pandit HJ, Fatema K, O’Sullivan D, Lewis D (2018) GDPRtEXT-GDPR as a linked data resource. In: European semantic web conference. Springer, Berlin, pp 481–495
Robaldo L, Sun X (2017) Reified input/output logic: combining input/output logic and reification to represent norms coming from existing legislation. J Log Comput 27(8):2471–2503
Steyskal S, Polleres A (2014) Defining expressive access policies for linked data using the ODRL ontology 2.0. In: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on semantic systems, ACM, pp 20–23
Valente A, Breuker J et al (1994) A functional ontology of law. Towards a global expert system in law, 112–136
van Kralingen R (1997) A conceptual frame-based ontology for the law. In: Proceedings of the first international workshop on legal ontologies, pp 6–17
Funding
The authors have received funding from EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 690974 (MIREL).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Leone, V., Di Caro, L. & Villata, S. Taking stock of legal ontologies: a feature-based comparative analysis. Artif Intell Law 28, 207–235 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-019-09252-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-019-09252-1