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Legal Ontology Engineering pp 1–16Cite as

Introduction

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Part of the book series: Law, Governance and Technology Series ((LGTS,volume 3))

Abstract

The formalization of legal information and knowledge for computer processing is not recent, nevertheless the advent of the Semantic Web offers new tools for the development of conceptual models for semantic applications: ontologies. This chapter contains a brief introduction to these issues and to the possibilities offered by the use and reuse of legal ontologies, which will be explored in-depth in the rest of the book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Mulder et al. (2010) for a recent redefinition of jurimetrics.

  2. 2.

    See Bing (1991) for an extensive introduction to legal information retrieval systems until the 1980s (or Bing (2010) for a brief account), and Bench-Capon (1990) for an account of legal knowledge based systems until the 1990s. Also, see Leith (2010) and Susskind (2010) for a critique of expert systems in the legal domain and a personal view on the development of legal informatics, respectively.

  3. 3.

    This is to be distinguished from Information Technology Law or Computer Law, which refers to the legal implications of the (mis)use of information and communication technologies, computers, intelligent agents and electronic institutions (e.g. surveillance and privacy, cybercrime, intellectual property, robot liability, etc.).

  4. 4.

    JURIX was initially a Dutch conference that took international dimensions later on. See also the workshop DEON (tri-annual workshop on deontic logics), at http://www.defeasible.org/deon2010, retrieved August 18, 2010.

  5. 5.

    Panel: Kevin D. Ashley, Michael O. Dyer, Ann Gardner, L. Thorne McCarty and Donald A. Waterman.

  6. 6.

    The synergy between AI and Law is revisited in Rissland et al. (2003).

  7. 7.

    It is interesting to note that the panel showed a “cautious optimism that it would eventually be possible to develop a lawyer’s workbench which would include tools ranging from standard retrieval tools like the existing WESTLAW and LEXIS full text retrieval systems, document generation aids, scheduling and calendar managers, to tools needing more intelligence like briefing assistants and interpretive analysis programs which could understand cases. This caution is based upon the nearly common experience of how long it takes to develop a program that can handle a few cases or problems, let alone the plethora occurring in real practice” (Rissland1985).

  8. 8.

    “Knowledge engineering has evolved from the late 1970s onward, from the art of building expert systems, knowledge-based systems, and knowledge-intensive information systems…Knowledge systems are the single most important industrial and commercial offspring of the discipline called artificial intelligence” (Schreiber et al. 1999).

  9. 9.

    “Knowledge-based systems (KBS) is a subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with creating programs that embody the reasoning expertise of human experts…The systems are at times referred to as expert systems and the terms are informally used interchangeably. ‘Expert system’ is however better thought of as referring to the level of aspiration for the system. If it can perform as well as an expert, then it can play that role; this has been done, but is relatively rare. More commonly the systems perform as intelligent assistants, making recommendations for a human to review. Speaking of them as expert systems thus sets too narrow a perspective and restricts the utility of the technology” (Davies 1999).

  10. 10.

    Knowledge acquisition from experts may not only be procedural but also conceptual (Steels 1990; Milton 2007). See also Gaines and Shaw (1989) for a comparison of expert’s conceptual systems.

  11. 11.

    “It is an interesting matter that since the classic ‘Handbook of Legal Information Retrieval’ edited by Jon Bing was published in 1984, improvement in legal information retrieval has not seen any major advancement. Quite to the contrary, information overload and increased demand for cross-national and cross-lingual legal information has amplified the basic problems. (…) Legal information retrieval systems still do not represent legal structural knowledge, user friendliness regarding search strategies and input formats is lacking, and information about system functions and information content (completeness) is often not sufficient. Also, continuity, representation of time layers and consolidated versions are inadequate and different user situations and information needs are disregarded. Finally, finding the correct search terms is a game of change, language approximation is minimal and even simple linguistic tools are missing” (Liebwald2007).

  12. 12.

    Nowadays, also a growing amount of legal information can be found and extracted from Web portals used by the legal community. For example, legal blogs or blawgs focus on discussions of substantive law and court decisions or procedural and professional matters (Conrad and Schilder2007). See the following blawg portals: Blawgs at http://www.blawg.com, and the Rutgers University Law Library guide to legal blogs at http://law-library.rutgers.edu/resources/lawblogs.php, retrieved November 10, 2008.

  13. 13.

    A recent referential publication on Semantic Web technologies and applications begins with: “That we need a new approach to managing information is beyond doubt. The technological developments of the last few decades, including the development of the World Wide Web, have provided each of us with access to far more information than we can comprehend or manage effectively” (Warren et al.2006).

  14. 14.

    “There is no widespread agreement on exactly what the semantic web is for or exactly what it is. Some good ideas about what the semantic web will be used for have emerged from the W3C effort to define a standard ontology language” (Uschold2003). Further, there exist different visions regarding the enhancement of the current web (already an extension of the original that now encompasses collaborative tools and social networks, a social web or web 2.0): folksonomies, social tagging, folktologies, etc. For an insight of some of the discussions see, for example, Uschold (2003), Gruber (2005, 2006) and d’Aquin et al. (2007). Also, the AAAI 2009 Spring Symposia included a symposium entitled “Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0” (http://tw.rpi.edu/sss09, retrieved August 18, 2010), and the International Semantic Web Conference 2010 hold the Third International Workshop on Social Data on the Web (SDoW2010) http://sdow.semanticweb.org/2010

  15. 15.

    The Linked Open Data diagram may be found at http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/. For more details on Linked Data efforts and community visit http://linkeddata.org and http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data. Also, this topic was the object of a special issue of the International Journal On Semantic Web and Information Systems (see Bizer et al. (2009) and visit http://www.ijswis.org/?q=node/31 for more details).

  16. 16.

    “Today, search engines for legal information retrieval do not include legal knowledge into their search strategies. These strategies include keyword and metadata search but do not address the semantics of the keywords, which would allow, for instance, conceptual query expansion. In other words, there is no semantic relationship between information needs of the user and the information content of documents apart from text pattern matching” (Peters et al. 2007). Also, different search algorithms have also been developed to aid searches and provide more precision and recall. See, for example, Google technology (http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html, retrieved August 18, 2010) and Google research (http://research.google.com/about.html, retrieved August 18, 2010) or Yahoo! Research in search sciences (http://labs.yahoo.com/Search_Sciences). Finally, see Jones (2009) for a criticism on legal database interface design.

  17. 17.

    Although efforts are being made by several legal companies to offer more accurate solutions, e.g., La Ley-Wolters Kluwver offers and expanded synonym search (http://www.atencionclientes.com/FAQ/LALEY/FAQ_Buscar_Sinonimos.htm).

  18. 18.

    Tim Berners-Lee is the director of this international consortium: http://www.w3.org

  19. 19.

    http://www.unicode.org

  20. 20.

    For details on XML technology visit http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/.

  21. 21.

    Triples can be written using XML tags. Visit http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rdf\#w3c_all for more information on RDF.

  22. 22.

    See Chap. 3 and visit http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/owl\#w3c_all, retrieved August 18, 2010, for more information.

  23. 23.

    A relevant cluster of projects was the European Semantic Systems Initiative (http://www.essi-cluster.org) that included: Adaptive Services Grid (ASG, http://asg-platform.org), Data, Information, and Process Integration with Semantic Web Services (DIP project, http://dip.semanticweb.org), Knowledge Web (http://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org), Project Super (Semantics Utilised for Process Management Within and Between Enterprises, http://www.ip-super.org), Tripcom (Triple Space Communication project, http://www.tripcom.org), and SEKT (Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies, http://www.sekt-project.com). The ESSI initiative created an Ontology working group to aligns the research and development efforts regarding ontology creation and management between the ESSI projects. See also Benjamins et al. 2005b.

  24. 24.

    Akoma Ntoso: http://www.akomantoso.org

  25. 25.

    LexML: http://www.legalxml.org

  26. 26.

    CEN Metalex: http://www.metalex.eu

  27. 27.

    Norme in Rete: http://www.ittig.cnr.it/Ricerca/UnitaEng.php?Id=40

  28. 28.

    The digitalisation of legal information and the availability of legal information on the Web (e.g., the Free Access to Law movement, specified in the Declaration on Free Access to Law at http://www.worldlii.org/worldlii/declaration, retrieved August 18, 2010), the development of legal XML standards (see, for the state of the art, Baglioli et al. (2007) and Biasiotti et al. (2008)), within others, are also important areas of research.

  29. 29.

    Smith (2003) and others (Schneider2003) have extensively criticised this subjacent idea of “conceptualization.”

  30. 30.

    Cyc: http://www.cyc.com (OpenCyc: http://www.opencyc.org)

  31. 31.

    SUMO: http://suo.ieee.org

  32. 32.

    PROTON: http://proton.semanticweb.org

  33. 33.

    DOLCE: http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html, there are different versions available (Lite, Ultralight), see diagram in Fig. 1.5.

  34. 34.

    WordNet: http://wordnet.princeton.edu

  35. 35.

    WordNet 2.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/wordnet-rdf/, Wordnet 3.0 OWL: http://www.ontologyportal.org/WordNet.owl

  36. 36.

    FRBRoo: http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbr_inro.html

  37. 37.

    GO: http://www.geneontology.org

  38. 38.

    “The 80s experiences in the field of legal knowledge formalization were mainly dedicated (especially in continental civil-law countries) to the choice of the best paradigm of representation (declarative versus deductive approach, rule-based, logic-based), while in the 90s most of the AI&Law community turned its attention to the features of legal reasoning and of the dialectic dimension of law (deontic modalities, defeasible reasoning, argument construction). Investigation on the type of entities of legal knowledge has been understated though. As a consequence, legal expert systems never came out of the level of prototypical applications, since they were lacking a solid methodology for knowledge modelling: formalizing legislative knowledge was a subjective process, time- and cost-consuming, relatively unreliable from the user perspective, and not easily re-usable by different applications. An ontology-based approach offers a solid support in the formalization process, as it permits the explicitation of the underling assumptions, and the formal definition of the components of legal knowledge. Accordingly, the tasks carried out in the past are being faced in a new perspective” (Gangemi et al.2003a).

  39. 39.

    Noteworthy exceptions in various areas of study are the works of Layman E. Allen, Kevin D. Ashley, Danièle Bourcier, Pompeu Casanovas, Fernando Galindo, Anne von der Lieth Gardner, Thomas F. Gordon, Pamela N. Gray, Graham Greenleaf, Marc Lauritsen, Philip Leith, Arno Lodder, Peter W. Martin, L. Thorne McCarty, Laurens Mommers, Henry Prakken, Giovanni Sartor, Richard Susskind, and Daniela Tiscornia, among others.

  40. 40.

    “Professional knowledge is developed as a product of professional action, and it establishes itself through work and performance in the profession, not merely through accumulation of theoretical knowledge, but thorough the integration, tuning and restructuring of theoretical knowledge to the demands of practical situations and constraints” (Bromme and Tillema 1995). Professional and expert knowledge (experts and professionals) are necessarily and closely related: “Current expert research, however, often overlooks the fact that expert activity is mostly professional activity, and that the information processed in its course belongs mainly to the culture of the respective profession. The application of expertise is thus also linked to enculteration within a profession” (Bromme and Tillema 1995).

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  1. Institute of Law and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Edifici B, 08193, Bellaterra, Spain

    Núria Casellas

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Casellas, N. (2011). Introduction. In: Legal Ontology Engineering. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1497-7_1

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