Semantic Reconciliation between two Different Aspects of Law

Abstract

This paper presents a proposal for reconciliation between the warehouse of legal documents created during legislation and Knowledge Warehouse that is dedicated to assisting both citizens and public officers in the procedural legal rules of Public Administration in Hungary. The Knowledge Warehouse contains several thousand detailed rules that describe how to manage and handle life events of citizens. This description can be considered as generic legal cases within legal procedures of authorities. The citizens trigger specific instances of the generic ones. The evolving Knowledge Warehouse main purpose is to enable citizens to get their specific legal cases started either through Web on the Government Portal or with the help of public officers. The Knowledge Warehouse will be extended by ontologies and semantic search capabilities. An Integrated System for Supporting of Codification will be created in an on-going project that will serve as sound basis for the National Warehouse of Legal Rules. The National Warehouse pursues the prescription of MetaLex legal standards in the case of representation of electronic legal documents. The two Warehouse are strongly coupled to each other. However, the syntactic and semantic structure of both differs profoundly. The representation of e-documents within the National Warehouse is in line with ELI, the European Legislation Identifier, even the ontologies and attached semantic description concentrates on the legal documents structural elements and their interpretation. The Knowledge Warehouse focuses on ontologies of life events and procedures of authorities to leverage semantic searching. The proposed solution tries to reconcile and integrate the two differing approaches.