Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In this paper, we introduce the role of Semantic Web technology for the legal domain. We will briefly discuss the current use of Information Technology in the legal domain, followed by an introduction to the Semantic Web. We then will put forward what we see as the particularities of the legal domain that need to be taken into account by technological solutions. Finally, we will explain how the articles in this volume contribute to the application of Semantic Web technology in the legal domain.

This article shows how the first generalized developments of legal informatics in the Civil Law systems were coherent with the dominant conception of the Law during the 70s and 80s. Today, that conception of the Law is in crisis, and it is possible to talk about a change in the mentality of jurists as well. Both changes generate new spaces and further opportunities for legal informatics and for legal knowledge management.

The new technologies imply important changes for judges in documentation consulting and other working habits. Presently, the legal codes and many judicial publications are being archived on electronic support and complex text and data bases are built up. How the judges are currently working and which are their difficulties? Would an interactive network help them to resolve the cases they face? These points and other many aspects of their daily activity are better known through the answers of the judges in a survey through questionnaire. Multidimensional exploratory techniques are used to design typologies according to the whole of the answers relative to the documents consulting. The authors use a survey to the young Spanish Judges to build up clusters of judges in accordance to their working habits.

In this article we present an overview of legal ontological modeling over a period of more than a decade. Most of the research reported concerns results from mid-size (European) projects aimed at the development of legal reasoning and information management tools and systems. In these projects we developed ontologies for several legal or regulation domains. However, the main thread of this article is provided by fundamental research performed by us or under our supervision (e.g. PhD theses by [1], [2], [3]), leading to more abstract legal ‘core’ ontologies and legal reasoning architectures. The major insights we have obtained from these experiences can be summarized as follows:

In this paper, we propose a number of basic types and roles of ontologies, and use them as a basis to analyze several legal ontologies in the AI and Law literature. We discuss some dimensions in which to distinguish types of ontologies, for example considering their level of structure. We propose five main roles of ontologies in general: (a) organize and structure information; (b) reasoning and problem solving; (c) se-mantic indexing and search; (d) semantics integration and interoperation; and (e) understanding the domain. We then discuss example of works that have exploited each of these roles in the AI and Law literature. Further, we discuss some of the consequences of using ontologies to play each of these roles in terms of the level of structure of the knowledge represented in the ontologies, the kinds of knowledge representation formalisms they use, and the reasoning methods they employ.

Reasoning about causation in fact is an essential element of attributing legal responsibility. Therefore, the automation of the attribution of legal responsibility requires a modelling effort aimed at the following: a thorough understanding of the relation between the legal concepts of responsibility and of causation in fact; a thorough understanding of the relation between causation in fact and the common sense concept of causation; and, finally, the specification of an ontology of the concepts that are minimally required for (automatic) common sense reasoning about causation. This article offers a worked out example of the indicated analysis, which comprises: a definition of the legal concept of responsibility; a definition of the legal concept of causation in fact; CausatiOnt, an AI-like ontology of the common sense (causal) concepts that are minimally needed for reasoning about the legal concept of causation in fact.

The increasing development of legal ontologies seems to offer interesting solutions to legal knowledge formalization, which in past experiences lead to a limited exploitation of legal expert systems for practical use. The paper describes how a constructive approach to ontology can provide useful components to create newly designed legal decision support systems either as local or Web-based semantic services. We describe the relation of our research to AI&Law and legal philosophy, the components of our Core Legal Ontology, the JurWordNet semantic lexicon, and some examples of use of legal ontologies for both norm conformity and compatibility. Our legal ontologies are based on DOLCE+, an extension of the DOLCE foundational ontology developed in the WonderWeb and Metokis EU projects.

This article describes an ontological model of norms. The basic assumption is that a substantial part of a legal system is grounded on the concept of . Since a legal system aims at regulating a society, then its goal can be achieved only by affecting the behavior of the members of the society. We assume that a society is made up of (which can be individuals, institutions, software programs, etc.), that agents have beliefs, goals and preferences, and that they commit to intentions in order to choose a line of behavior. The role of norms, within a legal system, is to specify how and when the chosen behavior agrees with the basic principles of the legal system. In this article, we show how a model based on plans can be the basis for the ontological representation of norms, linking them to the upper level of a philosophically well-founded ontology (DOLCE); in this way, the model is set in a wider perspective, which opens the way to further developments.

This paper presents how to build an ontology in the legal domain following the ontology development methodology METHONTOLOGY and using the ontology engineering workbench WebODE. Both of them have been widely used to develop ontologies in many other domains. The ontology used to illustrate this paper has been extracted from an existing class taxonomy proposed by Breuker, and adapted to the Spanish legal domain.

Pragmatics concerns itself with discourse as an illocutory act in a dynamic context. Building an ontology means that you describe a state of the world at a certain moment and in a certain form. How is it possible to take into account the dynamic and implicit dimension of legal discourse in the building of an ontology? This article mainly explores the new research area of institutional pragmatics and will conclude with some contradictory perspectives on pragmatics and ontology.