Abstract
The European Union is working towards harmonizing legislation across Europe, in order to improve cross-border interchange of legal information. This goal is supported for instance via standards such as the European Law Identifier (ELI) and the European Case Law Identifier (ECLI), which provide technical specifications for Web identifiers and suggestions for vocabularies to be used to describe metadata pertaining to legal documents in a machine readable format. Notably, these ECLI and ELI metadata standards adhere to the RDF data format which forms the basis of Linked Data, and therefore have the potential to form a basis for a pan-European legal Knowledge Graph. Unfortunately, to date said specifications have only been partially adopted by EU member states. In this paper we describe a methodology to transform the existing legal information system used in Austria to such a legal knowledge graph covering different steps from modeling national specific aspects, to population, and finally the integration of legal data from other countries through linked data. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by exemplifying practical use cases from legal information search, which are not possible in an automated fashion so far.
Highlights
The law can be seen as a framework that consists of a set of orders defining the rules that govern society
– We provide an overview of the knowledge graph construction process for our Legal Knowledge Graph (LKG), based on requirements derived from the Austrian legal system, and its current legal information system Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes (RIS);
The objective of the project was threefold: (i) develop a legal information system that is capable of representing related information, i.e. links to other legal documents referenced within a document, to classify documents based on a classification schema; (ii) to allow for enhanced search capabilities by making certain information contained in documents explicit, for instance linking entities mentioned in the documents to external knowledge bases such as Geonames or DBpedia; and (iii) to support cross-jurisdictional search requests by integrating legal data from other countries and the European Union
Summary
The law can be seen as a framework that consists of a set of orders defining the rules that govern society. We provide background information on respective standards and principles, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Linked Data, and discuss existing legal ontologies that serve as a basis to create our legal knowledge graph. Listing 1 RDF snippet for EU Directive 2014/92/EU (serialized in Turtle) it comes to machine-readability the Resource Description Framework (RDF) can be used to make metadata statements about a particular resource (e.g. in our case a legal provision or a court decision) which is identified by a Unique Resource Identifier (URI). In the first five lines URI prefixes used to appreviate namespaces are defined, such that for instance eli:LegalResource turns into http://data.europa.eu/eli/ontology# LegalResource (line 8). Additional formats include RDF in Attributes (RDFa), which is used to embed RDF in HTML and XML documents, or JSON-LD.
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