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Semantic Web Technologies and Legal Scholarly Publishing pp 45–93Cite as

Markup Beyond the Trees

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Part of the book series: Law, Governance and Technology Series ((LGTS,volume 15))

Abstract

The issue of enabling the coexistence of independent sets of annotations that may overlap on the same textual content has been and still is an important topic to address within the document markup community. In this chapter, I propose a solution to the problem of overlapping markup based on the use of Semantic Web technologies. In particular, I introduce EARMARK, the Extremely Annotational RDF Markup, a markup metalanguage and an OWL ontology that enable one to create documents with single hierarchies (as with XML) and also with multiple overlapping hierarchies whose textual content within the markup items belongs to some hierarchies but not to others. I show possible scenarios of application of EARMARK and, finally, I discuss how to use existing Semantic Web technologies, e.g., OWL DL reasoners, to assess the correctness properties typical of the structural markup, such as validity against a schema.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The document structure on its own can be seen as a particular kind of semantics. In fact, when we speak about a text as structured in terms of its paragraphs, sections, chapters, etc., what we are doing is to associate a semantic role of particular parts of the text.

  2. 2.

    The element person as defined in TEI Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (2013): http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-person.html.

  3. 3.

    The class Person as defined in FOAF (Brickley and Miller 2010): http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_Person.

  4. 4.

    Pellet: http://pellet.owldl.com.

  5. 5.

    EARMARK ontology: http://www.essepuntato.it/2008/12/earmark.

  6. 6.

    This and the following diagrams comply with the Graphic framework for OWL ontologies (Graffoo), introduced in Sect. 6.4. A legend for all Graffoo diagrams can be found in Fig. 6.13 on page 227.

  7. 7.

    All our OWL samples are presented using the Manchester Syntax (Horridge and Patel-Schneider 2012) and Turtle (Prud’hommeaux and 2013), which are two of the standard linearisation syntaxes of OWL. The prefixes rdfsand xsd refer respectively to RDF Schema and XML Schema namespaces, while the prefix earmark refers to the EARMARK ontology URI plus “#”. Moreover, we use the prefix co to indicate entities taken from an imported ontology made for the SWAN project (Ciccarese et al. 2008), available at http://swan-ontology.googlecode.com/svn/tags/1.2/collections.owl.

  8. 8.

    This class (and its name) is based on the concept introduced by Ted Nelson in his Xanadu Project (Nelson 1980) to refer to the collection of text fragments that can be interconnected to each other and transcluded into new documents.

  9. 9.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindrome#Semordnilaps.

  10. 10.

    A blog post by Paolo Ciccarese explaining why RDF collections cannot be used in OWL contexts: http://hcklab.blogspot.com/2008/12/moving-towards-swan-collectionshtml.

  11. 11.

    In the excerpt, the prefix overlapping refers to “http://www.essepuntato.it/2011/05/overlapping/”.

  12. 12.

    The EARMARK documents describing these three overlapping scenarios and all the other ones presented in the following sections are available at http://www.essepuntato.it/2011/jasist/examples.

  13. 13.

    The EARMARK Overlapping Ontology: http://www.essepuntato.it/2011/05/overlapping.

  14. 14.

    In order to individually address the issues, we edited the original bullets into a numbered list.

  15. 15.

    The full details about each version and each format are also available at http://www.essepuntato.it/2011/jasist/discussion.

  16. 16.

    HCalendar: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar.

  17. 17.

    HCard: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard.

  18. 18.

    Huggle: http://en.wikipediaorg/wiki/Wikipedia:Huggle.

  19. 19.

    Lupin, the Anti-vandal tool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lupin/Anti-vandal_tool.

  20. 20.

    Twinkle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Twinkle.

  21. 21.

    MediaWiki: http://www.mediawiki.org.

  22. 22.

    For the sake of clarity we removed all markup irrelevant to our discussion.

  23. 23.

    More formally, for XML-based languages, a content model of a markup element is “a simple grammar governing the allowed types of the child elements and the order in which they are allowed to appear” (Bray et al. 2006).

  24. 24.

    The model is available at http://www.essepuntato.it/2011/03/schemaexample.

  25. 25.

    The prefix pattern refers to “http://www.essepuntato.it/2008/12/pattern#”.

  26. 26.

    The Pattern Ontology: http://www.essepuntato.it/2008/12/pattern

  27. 27.

    http://www.essepuntato.it/2010/04/ParadiseLost

  28. 28.

    http://www.essepuntato.it/2010/04/ParadiseLost/test.

  29. 29.

    JXML2OWL: http://jxml2owl.projects.semwebcentral.org .

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40126 Bologna (BO), Bologna, Italy

    Silvio Peroni

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Peroni, S. (2014). Markup Beyond the Trees. In: Semantic Web Technologies and Legal Scholarly Publishing. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04777-5_3

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