Law JournalFeeds

Abstract  In this paper, we present an approach to commonsense causal explanation of stories that can be used for automatically determining
the liable party in legal case descriptions. The approach is based on

LRICore

, a core ontology for law that takes a commonsense perspective. Aside from our thesis that in the legal domain many terms
still have a strong commonsense flavour, the descriptions of events in legal cases, as e.g. presented at judicial trials,
are cast in commonsense terms as well. We present design principles for representing commonsense causation, and describe a
process-based approach to automatic identification of causal relations in stories, which are described in terms of the core
ontology. The resulting causal explanation forms a necessary condition for determining the liability and responsibility of
agents that play a role in the case. We describe the basic architecture and working of

DIRECT

, the demonstrator we are constructing to test the validity of our process oriented view on commonsense causation. This view
holds that causal relations are in fact abstractions constructed on the basis of our commonsense understanding of physical
and mental processes.

Abstract  This paper concerns the development and use of ontologies for electronically supporting and structuring the highest-level
function of government: the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies for the big and complex problems that
modern societies face. This critical government function usually necessitates extensive interaction and collaboration among
many heterogeneous government organizations (G2G collaboration) with different backgrounds, mentalities, values, interests
and expectations, so it can greatly benefit from the use of ontologies. In this direction initially an ontology of public
policy making, implementation and evaluation is described, which has been developed as part of the project ICTE-PAN of the
Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme of the European Commission, based on sound theoretical foundations mainly
from the public policy analysis domain and contributions of experts from the public administrations of four European Union
countries (Denmark, Germany, Greece and Italy). It is a ‘horizontal’ ontology that can be used for electronically supporting
and structuring the whole lifecycle of a public policy in any vertical (thematic) area of government activity; it can also
be combined with ‘vertical’ ontologies of the specific vertical (thematic) area of government activity we are dealing with.
In this paper is also described the use of this ontology for electronically supporting and structuring the collaborative public
policy making, implementation and evaluation through ‘structured electronic forums’, ‘extended workflows’, ‘public policy
stages with specific sub-ontologies’, etc., and also for the semantic annotation, organization, indexing and integration of
the contributions of the participants of these forums, which enable the development of advanced semantic web capabilities
in this area.

Abstract  In the legal domain, ontologies enjoy quite some reputation as a way to model normative knowledge about laws and jurisprudence.
This paper describes the methodology followed when developing the ontology used by the second version of the prototype Iuriservice, a web-based intelligent FAQ for judicial use. This modeling methodology has had two important requirements: on the one hand,
the ontology needed to be extracted from a repository of professional judicial knowledge (containing nearly 800 questions
regarding daily practice). Thus, the construction of ontologies of professional judicial knowledge demanded the description
of this knowledge as it is perceived by the judge. On the other hand, due to the distributiveness of the environment, there
was a need for controlled discussion and traceability of the arguments used in favor or against the introduction of a concept
X as part of the domain ontology. This paper presents the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK), extracted manually
from the selection of relevant terms from judicial practice questions and modeled according to the DILIGENT methodology. We
will show that DILIGENT has proved to be a methodology that facilitates the ontology engineering in a distributed environment,
although appropriate tool support needs to be developed.

Abstract  Legal Information Retrieval (IR) research has stressed the fact that legal knowledge systems should be sufficiently capable
to interpret and handle the semantics of a database. Modeling (expert-) knowledge by using ontologies enhances the ability
to extract and exploit information from documents. This contribution presents theories, ideas and notions regarding the development
of dynamic electronic commentaries based on a comprehensive legal ontology.