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Conceptual Modeling of Legal Relations

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Conceptual Modeling (ER 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11157))

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Abstract

Legal relations abound in conceptual modeling. Despite that, the representation of these relations in the area has not yet received sufficient theoretical support. We address this by establishing a basis for the well-founded representation of legal relations. We capture a comprehensive set of legal relations (and legal positions within these legal relations) that arise from widely accepted legal theories into a legal core ontology called UFO-L [14, 15], which is grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). We rely on the Theory of Constitutional Rights proposed by the philosopher of law Robert Alexy. This theory extends the system of legal positions proposed by the jurist Wesley Hohfeld, which has been used as a theoretical basis for several works in the conceptual modeling literature. The result is a modeling strategy for legal relations that in- corporates patterns from the legal core ontology. We present here a synthesis of empirical studies conducted to evaluate the aforementioned results. The studies show that the approach based on UFO-L produces models that are more comprehensible and clear for the representation of legal contracts.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by CNPq (407235/2017-5, 312123/2017-5, and 312158/2015-7), CAPES (23038.028816/2016-41), FAPES (69382549) and FUB (OCEAN Project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ontology and Conceptual Modeling Research Group (NEMO), Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), Vitória, ES, Brazil

    Cristine Griffo, João Paulo A. Almeida & Giancarlo Guizzardi

  2. Facoltà di Scienze e Tecnologie Informatiche, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Giancarlo Guizzardi

Authors
  1. Cristine Griffo
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  2. João Paulo A. Almeida
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  3. Giancarlo Guizzardi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristine Griffo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lucentia, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Juan C. Trujillo

  2. Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA

    Karen C. Davis

  3. Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Xiaoyong Du

  4. Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xian, China

    Zhanhuai Li

  5. Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Tok Wang Ling

  6. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, Beijing, China

    Guoliang Li

  7. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Mong Li Lee

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Griffo, C., Almeida, J.P.A., Guizzardi, G. (2018). Conceptual Modeling of Legal Relations. In: Trujillo, J., et al. Conceptual Modeling. ER 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11157. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00847-5_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00847-5_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00846-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00847-5

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