LegalLanguage: A Domain-Specific Language for Legal Contexts

Abstract

Nowadays legal ontologies have been used in the legal domain, however, being poorly explored in legislative and production processes. This paper analyses the adoption of legal ontologies as a tool to support these processes, in particular, related to activities span from the submission of bills and their subsequent authoring and ratification. This paper introduces the state of the art of legal (or normative) ontologies; and also discusses some application examples. The analysis of this state of the art allows us to identify some problems, namely regarding the activities involving the authoring and validation of laws that tend to be very human-intensive and error-prone. As a consequence of this analysis, we introduce the LegalLanguage, a language particularly suitable for the authoring and specification of law(s) in a more rigorous and systematic way, that would allow to keep track different types of intra and inter-laws relationships (e.g., structural, order or temporal relationships between articles or even between laws). Finally, a simple illustrative example is used and shows the importance of a language like LegalLanguage in the production of normative documents.