Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Semantic Resources for Managing Legislative Information

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Legislative XML for the Semantic Web

Part of the book series: Law, Governance and Technology Series ((LGTS,volume 4))

Abstract

The new frontier of the Semantic Web is moving more and more away from information searching of the substantial aspects of documents requiring the availability of advanced editing tools able to handle and manage not only the text but also the semantics of documents. The structuring of legal text in XML offers the opportunity to render legislation not only machine-processable but also machine-understandable, enabling legislative text and its contents to be semantically annotated and conceptually identified by means of semantic mark-up. Starting from this assumption, this chapter is devoted to the analysis of the state of the art of the semantic resources that can be used by information technology as tools for overcoming issues linked with the semantic management of legislative texts.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    ISO: 5964:1985 guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesaurus

  2. 2.

    ISO: 5964:1985 guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesaurus

  3. 3.

    The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) and its domain ontologies form the largest formal public ontology in existence today. The Standard Upper Ontology (SUO) is an effort by IEEE members to create a high-level ontology, for use by expert systems and intelligent agents within a variety of domains. The goal is to create a framework by which disparate systems may utilize a common knowledge base from which more domain-specific ontologies may be derived

  4. 4.

    DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) is a foundationalontology (FO) developed originally in the EU WonderWeb project. FOs are domain-independent axiomatic theories, containing a rich axiomatization of their vocabulary, and are used to make the rationales and alternatives underlying different ontological choices as explicit as possible.

  5. 5.

    Fellbaum, C. ed. 1998. WordNet: An electronic lexical database. London, England: The MIT Press, Cambridge.

  6. 6.

    See (Gangemi, A., N. Guarino, and A. Oltramari. 2001. Conceptual analysis of lexical taxonomies: The case of WordNet Top-Level. In Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of FOIS2001. C. Welty and S. Barry eds., 285–296. ACM Press.), for an interesting analysis of the logical consistency of the top level hierarchies of WordNet.

  7. 7.

    Gangemi, A., C. Catenacci, and M. Battaglia. 2004. The inflammation ontology design pattern: An exercise in building a core biomedical ontology with descriptions and situations. In Biomedical Ontologies. D. Pisanelli ed. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

  8. 8.

    Gangemi, A., N. Guarino, C. Masolo, A. Oltramari, and L. Schneider. 2002. Sweetening ontologies with DOLCE. In Proceedings of EKAW 2002, Siguenza, Spain.

  9. 9.

    Gruber, T. R. 1993a. Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. In Formal ontology in conceptual analysis and knowledge representation. N. Guarino, and R. Poli eds. Deventer, The Netherlands: Kluwer. See also, Gangemi, A., D.M. Pisanelli, and G. Steve. 1999. An overview of the ONIONS project: Applying ontologies to the integration of medical terminologies. Data and Knowledge Engineering 31:183–220.

  10. 10.

    Masolo, C., S. Borgo, A. Gangemi, N. Guarino, and A. Oltramari. 2003. The wonderWeb library of foundational ontologies, IST 2001-33052 wonder web. http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org/deliverables/documents/D18.pdf.

  11. 11.

    e.g. Hoekstra, R., J. Breuker, M. Di Bello, and A. Boer. June 2007. The LKIF core ontology of basic legal concepts. In Proceedings of the workshop on legal ontologies and artificial intelligence techniques (LOAIT 2007), eds. Pompeu Casanovas, Maria Angela Biasiotti, Enrico Francesconi, and Maria Teresa Sagri, http://www.estrellaproject.org/lkif-core.

  12. 12.

    www.wordnet.princeton.edu/

  13. 13.

    Fellbaum, C. ed. 1998. WordNet: An electronic lexical database. London, England: The MIT Press, Cambridge.

  14. 14.

    Ide, N., D. Greenstein, and P. Vossen. eds. 1998. Special Issue on EuroWordNe. Computers and the Humanities, 32(2–3):XXXII.

  15. 15.

    http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/framenet

  16. 16.

    See the Cyc’s web site: http://www.cyc.com

  17. 17.

    Matuszek C., J. Cabral, M. Witbrock, and J. DeOliveira. March 2006. An introduction to the syntax and content of Cyc. In Proceedings of the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium on Formalizing and Compiling Background Knowledge and Its Applications to Knowledge Representation and Question Answering, Stanford, CA.

  18. 18.

    http://www.cyc.com/cyc/technology/whatiscyc.

  19. 19.

    eurovoc.europa.eu/.

  20. 20.

    http://iate.europa.eu/.

  21. 21.

    http://www.senato.it/guida/29346/30502/30503/genpaginamenu.htm.

  22. 22.

    See paragraph 9.3.1.

  23. 23.

    Within the LOIS database, synsets are related to each other by means of semantic relations, the most important of which are hypernymy/hyponymy (between specific and more general concepts), meronymy (between parts and wholes), and antonymy (between semantically opposite concepts); even if less used,LOIS also includes all EWN relations

  24. 24.

    Sagri, M.T., and D. Tiscornia. 2003. In Semantic tools for accessing legal information. Atti del Convegno IADIS: E-Society 2003 (Lisbona, 3-6 Giugno 2003), eds. A. Palma dos Reis and P. Isaías (a cura di), IADIS Press.

  25. 25.

    Curtoni, P., V. Di Tomaso, L. Dini, L. Mommers, W. Peters, P. Quaresma, E. Schweighofer, and D. Tiscornia. 2005. Semantic access to multilingual legal information. In Workshop on “Free EU Information on the Web: The Future beyond the new EUR-Lex”, Brussels.

  26. 26.

    Peters, W., M.T. Sagri, D. Tiscornia, and S. Castagnoli. 2006. The LOIS Project. The Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC, Genova.

  27. 27.

    Rossi, P., and C. Vogel. 2004. Terms and concepts; towards a syllabus for European private law. European Review of Private Law (ERPL), 12(2):293–300.

  28. 28.

    http://www.copecl.org

  29. 29.

    Christodoulakis, D. et al. 2002. Expanding EuroWordNet with domain-specific terminology using common lexical resources: Vocabulary completeness and coverage issues. In Proceedings of the 1st Global Wordnet Conference (GWC), January 21–25. Mysore: India.

  30. 30.

    http://www.ceid.upatras.gr/Euroterm/

  31. 31.

    Estrella project (IST-2004-027665), http://www.estrellaproject.org. See (Boer, A., R. Winkels, and F. Vitali. 2007. XML Standards for Law: MetaLex and LKIF. In Proceedings of JURIX 2007. Amsterdam: IOS Press.) for a specification of the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format.

References

  1. Agnoloni, T., L. Bacci, E. Francesconi, G. Giardiello, P. Spinosa, and F. Uccheddu. 2006. XmLegesEditor v.2.0 rc5. Editore per la redazione di testi normativi, Ittig-Cnr, Firenze.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Baker, Collin F., Charles J. Fillmore, and John B. Lowe. 1998. The Berkeley framenet project. In COLING- ACL’98: Proceedings of the Conference, 86–90, Montrìal. Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bartalesi, et al. 2008. The LME project: legislative metadata based on semantic formal models, in Journal International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, Volume 4 Issue 3, August 2009. In Proceedings of LEGONT’97, Melbourne, Australia.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bartolini, R., A. Lenci, S. Montemagni, V. Pirrelli, and C. Soria. 2004. Semantic Mark-up of Italian legal texts through NLP-based technique. In Proceedings of LREC 2004, Lisbon, Portugal.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bench-Capon, T.J.M., and P.R.S. Visser. 1997. Ontologies in legal information systems; the need for explicit specifications of domain conceptualisations. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL’97), 132–141. ACM, New York, NY.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Berrueta, D., J.E. Labra, and L. Polo. 2006. Searching over public administration legal documents using ontologies, Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications, Vol. 140, 167–175.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Biagioli, C. 1997. Towards a legal rules functional micro-ontology. In Proceedings of LEGONT’97, Melbourne, Australia.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Biagioli, C., and D. Grossi. 2008. Formal aspects of legislative meta-drafting. In Proceedings of Jurix08, Florence, Italy.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Biasiotti, M.A., and M. Fernandez Barrera. 2009. Enriching Thesauri with Ontological Information: Eurovoc Thesaurus and DALOS domain Ontology of consumer law. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques (LOAIT 2009), Barcelona, Spain, June 8, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Boer, A., R. Winkels, and R. Hoekstra. 2001. The clime ontology. In Winkels, R., editor. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Legal Ontologies (LEGONT) in JURIX 2001, Amsterdam (Netherlands), 37–47, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Breuker, J., and R. Hoekstra. 2004. Core concepts of law: Taking commonsense seriously. In Proceedings of Formal Ontologies in Information Systems FOIS-2004, 210–221. IOS-Press.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Breuker, J., and R. Hoekstra. 2004. Epistemology and ontology in core ontologies: FOLaw and LRI-Core, two core ontologies for law. In Proceedings of EKAW Workshop on Core ontologies, Northamptonshire, UK.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Breuker, J., A. Valente, and R. Winkels. 2005. Use and reuse of legal ontologies in knowledge engineering and information management. In Law and the semantic web. Legal ontologies, methodologies, legal information retrieval, and applications, eds. V. Benjamins, P. Casanovas, J. Breuker, and A. Gangemi, 35–64. Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Breuker, J. et al. 2008. The flood, the channels and the Dykes. In Law, ontologies and the semantic web, eds. J. Breuker et al. The Netherlands. Springer, IOS Press.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Buitelaar, P., P. Cimiano, and B. Magnini. 2005. Ontology learning from text: An overview. In Ontology learning from text: Methods, evaluation and applications, eds. P. Buitelaar, P. Cimiano, and B. Magnini, volume 123 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications Series. IOS Press.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Cimiano, P., and J. Voeìlker. 2005. Text2onto - a framework for ontology learning and data-driven change discovery. In Proceedings of the 10th international conference on applications of natural language to information systems (NLDB), eds. A. Montoyo, R. Munoz, and E. Metais, volume 3513 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 227–238. Alicante, Spain: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Corcho, O., M. Fernandez, and A. Gomez-Perez. 2003. Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies: Where is the meeting point? In Data & knowledge engineering 46.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Cunningham, H., D. Maynard, K. Bontcheva, and V. Tablan. 2002. GATE: A framework and graphical development environment for robust NLP tools and applications. In Proceedings of the 40th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’02), 168–175, USA: Philadelphia.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Delgado, Jaime et al. In IPROnto: An ontology for digital rights management. In Proceedings of Jurix 2003: The Sixteenth Annual Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Després, S., and S. Szulman. 2006. Terminae method and integration process for legal ontology building. In IEA/AIE, eds. M. Ali, and R. Dapoigny, volume 4031 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1014–1023. Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Dick, J.P. 1991. Representation of legal text for conceptual retrieval. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, Oxford, England, 106–115. New York: ACM Press.

    Google Scholar 

  22. Farquhar, A., R. Fikes, and J. Rice. 1997. Tools for assembling modular ontologies in ontolingua. In AAAI - National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 14, 436–441. Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Fillmore, C.J., and Collin F. Baker. June 2001. Frame se- mantics for text understanding. In Proceedings of Word- Net and Other Lexical Resources Workshop, 59–64, NAACL, Pittsburgh.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Fortuna, B., M. Grobelnik, and D. Mladenic. 2007. Ontogen: Semi-automatic ontology editor. In Proceedings of human interface and the management of information. Interacting in information environments, symposium on human interface 2007, held as part of HCI international 2007, Beijing, China, July 22–27, eds. M. J. Smith, and G. Salvendy, volume 4558 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 309–318. Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Gangemi, A., N. Guarino, C. Masolo, and A. Oltramari. 2002. Luc Schneider: Sweetening ontologies with DOLCE. EKAW 166–181.

    Google Scholar 

  26. Gangemi, A., M.-T. Sagri, and D. Tiscornia. 2003. Metadata for content description in legal information. In 14th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems ApplicatSpringer, IOS Press, 2008, The Netherlandsions (DEXA’03), September 1–5, Prague, Czech Republic, 745, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Gruber, T.R. 1993. Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. Technical Report KSL 93-04, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University.

    Google Scholar 

  28. Gruber, T.R. 1991. The role of common ontology in achieving sharable, reusable knowledge bases. In Principles of knowledge representation and reasoning: Proceedings of the second international conference, eds. J.A. Allen, R. Fikes, and E. Sandewall, 601–602. Cambridge, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Guarino, N. 1998a. Formal ontology in information systems. In Proceedings of the First Conference (FOIS’98), IOS Press Trento, Italy, 6–8 June 1998. Guarino, N. 1998b. Formal ontology in information systems. In Formal ontology in information systems. Proceedings of FOIS’98, Trento, Italy, 6–8 June 1998, ed. N. Guarino, 3–15. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Hirst, G. 2004. Ontology and the lexicon. In Handbook on Ontologies. S. Staab and R. Studer eds., 209–229. Heidelberg: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Hoekstra, R., J. Breuker, M. Di Bello, and A. Boer. 2007. The LKIF Core ontology of basic legal concepts. In Proceedings of the workshop on legal ontologies and artificial intelligence techniques (LOAIT 2007), eds. P. Casanovas, M.A. Biasiotti, E. Francesconi, and M. Teresa Sagri, June 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Jarrar, M. 2006. Towards the Notion of Gloss, and the Adoption of Linguistic Resources in Formal Ontology Engineering. In Proceedings of the 15th International World Wide Web Conference. WWW2006, ACM Press, Barcelona.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Jarrar, M.K., and P. Dongilli. 2006. Multilingual verbalization of norm conceptual models and axiomatized ontologies. Starlab technical report, STARLab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

    Google Scholar 

  34. Lame, G. 2001. Constructing an IR-oriented legal ontology. In Second International Workshop on Legal Ontologies, JURIX 2001, Amsterdam, Neederlands, December 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  35. Li, Y., K. Bontcheva, and H. Cunningham. 2005. SVM Based Learning System For Information Extraction. In Deterministic and statistical methods in machine learning, eds. J. Winkler, M.N. and N. Lawerence, LNAI 3635, 319–339. Berlin: Springer.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  36. Masolo, C., S. Borgo, A. Gangemi, N. Guarino, A. Oltramari, and L. Schneider. 2002. Preliminary report wonderweb deliverable D17. The WonderWeb Library of Foundational Ontologies and the DOLCE ontology. (ver. 2.0, 15-08-2002).

    Google Scholar 

  37. Masolo, C., A. Oltramari, A. Gangemi, N. Guarino, and L. Vieu. 2003. La prospettiva dell’ontologia applicata. Rivista di estetica, 22(1/2003), XLIII:170–183.

    Google Scholar 

  38. McGuinness, D.L., and J.R. Wright. 1998. Conceptual modelling for configuration: A description logic-based approach. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing, 12:333–344.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. McGuinness, D.L., R. Fikes, J. Rice, and S. Wilder. 2000. The chimaera ontology environment. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2000), Austin, TX, July 30–August 3.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Missikof, M., R. Navigli, and P. Velardi. 2002. Integrated approach to web ontology learning and engineering. Computer, 35(11):54–57.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Musen, M.A. 1992. Dimensions of knowledge sharing and reuse. Computers and Biomedical Research, 25:435–467.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Navigli, R., and P. Velardi. 2004. Learning domain ontologies from document warehouses and dedicated web sites. Computational Linguistics 30(2):151–179.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Peters, W., M.T. Sagri, D. Tiscornia, and S. Castagnoli. 2006. The LOIS project. In The Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC, Genova.

    Google Scholar 

  44. Rosch, E.H. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Cognition and categorization, eds. E. Rosch and B. Lloyd, 27–48. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Rubino, R., A. Rotolo, and G. Sartor. 2006. An OWL Ontology of Fundamental Legal Concepts. In Proceeding of the 2006 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2006: The Nineteenth Annual Conference. T. M. van Engers ed., 101–110., The Netherlands: IOS Press, Amsterdam.

    Google Scholar 

  46. Sartor, G. 2006. Fundamental legal concepts: A formal and teleological characterisation, artificial intelligence and law. Technical report. European University Institute, Florence/Cirsfid, University of Bologna.

    Google Scholar 

  47. Sartor, G., P. Casanovas, M.A. Biasiotti, and M. Fernández-Barrera. eds. 2011. Approaches to legal ontologies. Theories, domains, methodologies, Series: Law, governance and technology series, Vol. 1. The Netherlands: Springer, IOS Press.

    Google Scholar 

  48. Saskia van de Ven, Rinke Hoekstra, and Radboud Winkels. June 2007. MetaVex: Regulation drafting meets the semantic web. In Proceedings of the workshop on semantic web technology for law (SW4Law 2007), eds. M. Klein, P. Quaresma, and N. Casellas, 42–55. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  49. Sclano, F., and P. Velardi. 2007. Termextractor: a web application to learn the common terminology of interest groups and research communities. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Terminology and Artificial Intelligence (TIA’07), Sophia Antinopolis, October.

    Google Scholar 

  50. Smith, B. 2003. The cambridge companion to searle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  51. Spyns, P., and A. Lisovoy. 2003. The dogma modeller manual. EuroLan 2003 tutorial material STAR-2003-11, STAR Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

    Google Scholar 

  52. Stamou, S., A. Ntoulas, J. Hoppenbrouwers, M. Saiz-Noeda, and D. Christodoulakis. 2002. EUROTERM: Extending the EuroWordNet with Domain-Specific Terminology Using an Expand Model Approach. In Proceedings of the 1st Global Wordnet Conference (GWC), January 21–25, Mysore, India.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Valente, A., and J. Breuker. 1995. ON-LINE: An architecture for modelling legal information. In Proceedings of the fifth international conference on artificial intelligence and law, eds. T. Bench-Capon, 1079–1125. New York: ACM Press.

    Google Scholar 

  54. Velardi, P., R. Navigli, A. Cucchiarelli, and F. Neri. 2005. Evaluation of OntoLearn, a methodology for automatic population of domain ontologies. In Ontology learning from text: Methods, evaluation and applications, eds. P. Buitelaar, P. Cimiano, and B. Magnini, volume 123 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications Series, 92–106. The Netherlands: IOS Press.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Wyner, A. June 2009. Lagal Ontologies Spin up a Semanti Web, June 08, 2009. http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007.

  56. Yehia-Dahab, M., H.A. Hasan, and A. Rafea. 2008. Textontoex: Automatic ontology construction from natural english text. Expert Systems with Applications, 34:1474–1480.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ITTIG-CNR, Institute for Legal Information Theory and Techniques, National Research Council of Italy, 50127, Florence, Italy

    Maria Angela Biasiotti

Authors
  1. Maria Angela Biasiotti
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maria Angela Biasiotti .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. European University Institute, Via Boccaccio, Villa Schifanoia 121, Florence, 50133, Italy

    Giovanni Sartor

  2. Via Zamboni 33, Bologna, 40126, Italy

    Monica Palmirani

  3. Information Theory and Techniques, IOTTIG-CNR, Institute of Legal, Florence, 50127, Italy

    Enrico Francesconi

  4. ITTIG-CNR, Via Panciatichi 56/16, Florence, 50127, Italy

    Maria Angela Biasiotti

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Biasiotti, M.A. (2011). Semantic Resources for Managing Legislative Information. In: Sartor, G., Palmirani, M., Francesconi, E., Biasiotti, M. (eds) Legislative XML for the Semantic Web. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1887-6_9

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation