Moving in the Time: An Ontology for Identifying Legal Resources

Abstract

The paper presents an application of the FRBR OO document model for defining an information ontology of legal resources that takes into account the dimension of time. FRBR-based paradigms are used within several existing projects in computer support of activities in the legal domain, but they are mostly oriented to bibliographic organization of documents without a real modeling of the peculiar characteristics of the legal domain. Also, all of them refer to the current version of the FRBR model, called FRBR ER . Yet, in these years the FRBR model is undergoing a major revision and a new version using an object-oriented approach is being developed. Thus we first have updated the model of legal resources to rely on the new object-oriented model, called FRBR OO . More importantly, consistency problems were corrected and the time dimension was introduced, which came very useful when considering the legal domain and dealing with legal resources. Therefore, while it is not in the scope of this paper to define an abstract model of the norms (e.g. obligations, permissions, etc.) or the representation of the norms (e.g. rules model), we rather focus our attention on the abstract description of the normative acts lifecycle and how it is possible to fill the gap between the rule modeling and the structure of the legal resources.