Intuitionistic Description Logic and Legal Reasoning

Abstract

Classical Logic has been used as a basis for knowledge representation and reasoning in many domains. Legal Knowledge Representation is interesting due to the natural occurrences of conflicts among law systems, individual laws and cases, usually taken as logical inconsistencies. Due to its inherently normative feature, coherence (consistency) in legal ontologies is more subtle than in other domains. An adequate intuitionistic semantics for negation in a legal domain comes to the fore when we consider laws as individuals instead of propositions. This paper presents a version of Intuitionistic Description Logic designed for legal knowledge representation. The paper discusses a logical coherence analysis of ``Conflict of Laws in Space'', using our logic, and briefly compares this analysis to other logical approaches to Legal Reasoning.