Legal Ontology Research Articles

Deriving ontological semantic relations between Arabic compound nouns concepts

Legal ontologies have proved their increasingly substantial role in representing, processing and retrieving legal information. By using the knowledge modeled by such ontologies in form of concepts and relations, it is possible to reason over the semantic content of legal documents. Supporting (semi-) automatically the development of ontologies from text is commonly referred to as ontology learning from text. The learning process includes learning of the concepts that will form the ontology and learning of the semantic relations among them.In this paper, we present a new approach for expliciting the semantic relations between Arabic compound nouns concepts. The originality of this work is twofold. Firstly, the technique of inferring relations is based on exploiting the internal structure of the compounds using a defined set of domain-and language-independent rules according to their different structures, on the one hand, and on studying prepositions semantics specifying the inferred relations applying a gamification mechanism that collects human votes, on the other hand. Secondly, relying on the compounds set described by both binary (structural positions in which there are written) and relational attributes (the deduced relations), we used a “Relational Concept Analysis” (RCA) technique, as an adaptation of “Formal Concept Analysis” (FCA), for the construction of interconnected lattices that we transformed into ontological concepts and relations which can be either taxonomic or transversal.Experiments carried out on Arabic legal dataset showed that the proposed approach reached encouraging performance through achieving high precision and recall scores. This performance affects positively the retrieval results of legal documents based on a powerful ontology, which presents our main objective.

Visualization of Hajime Yoshino’s Logical Jurisprudence

Hajime Yoshino’s Logical Jurisprudence (LJ) is an important concept in legal informatics. Yoshino aims for a logic-based systematization in the legal domain. He focuses on legal reasoning and systematization. Inevitably, embracing law as a whole brings us to Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law. In sum, three issues are important in LJ: logic, Kelsen and legal informatics. In this paper we aim to visualize the architecture of LJ. We suggest expanding this with legal ontologies and words. The granularity of word-phrase-sentence-text is about different methods which apply to different units.

SPARQL Query Automatic Transformation Method based on Keyword History Ontology for Semantic Information Retrieval

In semantic information retrieval, we first need to build domain ontology and second, we need to convert the users’ search keywords into a standard query such as SPARQL. In this paper, we propose a method that can automatically convert the users’ search keywords into the SPARQL queries. Furthermore, our method can ensure effective performance in a specific domain such as law. Our method constructs the keyword history ontology by associating each keyword with a series of information when there are multiple keywords. The constructed ontology will convert keyword history ontology into SPARQL query. The automatic transformation method of SPARQL query proposed in the paper is converted into the query statement that is deemed the most appropriate by the user’s intended keywords. Our study is based on the existing legal ontology constructions that supplement and reconstruct schema and use it as experiment. In addition, design and implementation of a semantic search tool based on legal domain and conduct experiments. Based on the method proposed in this paper, the semantic information retrieval based on the keyword is made possible in a legal domain. And, such a method can be applied to the other domains.

Legal Ontology, Scientific Expertise and The Factual World

AbstractThis article analyses the role of scientific information in legal proceedings by exploring the relationship of law, science and the factual world. The article compares legal and scientific ontology, and discusses how they relate to each other. The comparison is used to explain previous controversies between legal and scientific experts. Special consideration is devoted to the legal notion of cause-in-fact, which is discussed at length. The article distinguishes among different meanings of “facticity” in the legal discourse on causation, and discusses the bearing that these meanings have on the legal relevance of scientific information.

Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Dis-Indigenization of SSmi Identity Through Legal Discourse

Through government proposition 1976/77:80, Sami people in Sweden was formally declared as indigenous people by the Swedish national parliament in 1977. Nevertheless, to this day Sami in Sweden do not acquire indigenous rights that are conferred per international legal standard, i.e., self-determination and land rights. Historically, Swedish legislations has been refusing and prolonging Sami people their rights. This is done by various assimilation policies as well as by categorizing them as something other than an indigenous group (dis-indigenization process). This convolution of the ontology of Sami in Sweden is done through the discourse of laws. In this sense, the state—through its agencies—proposes a Sami legal ontology absent of its indigeneity. This paper will examine such dis-indigenization process through discourse analysis with specific focus on Swedish statutory codes 2009:600 and 2009:724. (Less)

Ciencia, personas, derechos

<p>Buena parte de los universitarios no se atreven a declarar que cada ser humano es una persona, y que sus derechos básicos surgen desde esta condición personal. En lugar de admitir esta realidad han construido teorías sobre la justicia de naturaleza exclusivamente racional, diseñadas sobre la igualdad de los sujetos. Resulta así que las personas deben sus derechos a razonamientos que ellas mismas hacen; estos razonamientos suelen ser llamados constructos, igual en la teoría física que en la teoría sobre la ética. El Autor muestra algunos rasgos de estas construcciones racionales que se imponen, a modo de esquemas interpretativos necesariamente operativos, entre el hombre y la realidad que el género humano trata de explicar en cada ciencia; y cómo la mentalidad que estaba en su base ha caído con la crisis de la física tradicional, sin que los nuevos métodos de las ciencias naturales hayan superado este problema. Igualmente, destaca las funciones de las ‘cosas’ (ontología jurídica) que sirven de puentes entre los hombres y también de instrumentos a través de los cuales cada cual desarrolla necesariamente su personalidad.</p>

LOTED2: An ontology of European public procurement notices

This paper describes the construction of the LOTED2 ontology for the representation of European public procurement notices. LOTED2 follows initiatives around the creation of linked data-compliant representations of information regarding tender notices in Europe, but focusing on placing such representations within their legal context. It is therefore considered a legal ontology, as it supports the identification of legal concepts and more generally, legal reasoning. Unlike many other legal ontologies however, LOTED2 is designed to support the creation of Semantic Web applications. The methodology applied for building LOTED2 therefore seeks to find a compromise between the accurate representation of legal concepts and the usability of the ontology as a knowledge model for Semantic Web applications, while creating connections to other relevant ontologies in the domain.

Metaphor as Analogy: Reproduction and Production of Legal Concepts

Metaphor can be compared to analogy because they both have, additionally to their rhetorical competence, an epistemic force. Through analogy legal concepts are reproduced according to similarity; reproduction is always a new production and thus analogy and metaphor in law have a poietic force. The reproduction and production (poiesis) of legal concepts through metaphor by analogy concerns the interference between classificatory operations in law and legal epistemology: in every categorization of the unknown by means of the known, legal ontology and legal epistemology intersect.

A Framework for Legal Information Retrieval based on Ontology

Professional knowledge such as legal information is commonly not accessible or cannot be easily understood by the public. By using the legal ontology which is previously established, the legal information retrieval based on ontology is to use for the information retrieval. In this paper, we propose the matters required for the design and develop of the framework for the legal information retrieval based on ontology. The framework is composed of the query conversion engine of SPARQL base for query to OWL ontology and user query type engine and return value refinement engine and web interface engine. The framework does the role as the infrastructure which retrieval the legal ontology effectually and which it serves and can be used in the semantic legal information retrieval service.

The becoming of ancestral land: Place and property in Mapuche land claims

ABSTRACTIf Mapuche land claims in southern Chile reflect the incommensurability of local notions of place and the legal principles of property, they also reveal intersections between indigenous and legal ontologies of land. Property languages and technologies allow claimants to frame knowledge about ancestral territory in ways consistent with local significations of place as a sentient agent. Yet they also serve as mechanisms for codifying indigenous geographies in terms congruent with existing property regimes and market configuration. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's notions of becoming, I argue that understanding ancestral land formation requires an anthropological imagination that acknowledges the conceptual antagonism of state and indigenous geographies as well as their intersections in claimants’ actions. [land, state, property, indigeneity, Latin America, Chile, deterritorialization]

Ontology-driven Generation of Training Paths in the Legal Domain

This paper presents a methodology for helping citizens obtain guidance and training when submitting a natural language description of a legal case they are interested in. This is done via an automatic mechanism, which firstly extracts relevant legal concepts from the given textual description, by relying upon an underlying legal ontology built for such a purpose and an enrichment process based on common-sense knowledge. Then, it proceeds to generate a training path meant to provide citizens with a better understanding of the legal issues arising from the given case, with corresponding links to relevant laws and jurisprudence retrieved from an external legal repository. This work de-scribes the creation of the underlying legal ontology from existing sources and the ontology integration algorithm used for its production; besides, it details the generation of the training paths and reports the results of the preliminary experimentation that has been carried out so far. This methodology has been implemented in an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) system that is part of an Italian initiative for assisted legal mediation.

Generalizing Hierarchical Structure of Indices for Japanese Legal Documents

Abstract The idea of hierarchical index is applied to the legal domain to provide the readers a general understanding of legal concepts via their super/sub-ordinate relations. This work serves as effort in automatic legal ontology learning in which super/sub-ordinate relations are considered. Indices are extracted from legal documents as keywords and their relationships are discovered by language processing method. We propose an approach to extract the super/sub- ordinate relation between each pair of concepts individually based on directional similarity. The relations among a set of legal indices are represented in a directed graph and the hierarchical structure of indices is simply exported from this graph. We adopt this proposal to the Japanese National Pension Act document. The resulted hierarchical structure is compared to an annotated legal ontology on the number of correct relations. The proposed method achieves 40.6% for precision, 46.9% for recall and 43.5% for F-measure as the performance.

An Applied Legal Ontology in Arabic for the Jurisprudence Decision-Structuring

The general context of the authors' work is the development of a system of research of Tunisian jurisprudence in the Arabic language. The operational objective of this system is to provide assistance to lawyers to resolve a given legal situation in making available a collection of similar situations which will improve their future reasoning. A legal ontology, describing the semantics of the textual corpus of decisions, is necessary at different levels of construction and use of the system. In this paper, the authors are interested in the first phase of the development of this system, which is the decision structuring.

법령 온톨로지 구축에 관한 연구

본 논문에서는 법령 온톨로지 구축을 위해 법령의 구조적 특징과 요소 간의 관계에 대해 분석 정리하고 정리된 내용을 바탕으로 OWL DL 수준의 매핑 규칙을 제안한다. 제안하는 매핑 규칙은 국내 법령 관계의 상-하위 구조, 법령의 고유 속성, 법률 간의 참조 관계와 같은 구조적인 관계의 TBox를 구축하는 방법과 법률 문장을 분석하여 조문 규정 별로 나타나는 문장의 패턴 유형을 선별, ABox로 구축될 수 있는 요소를 표현한다. 제안된 매핑 규칙은 일반 텍스트로 설명되고 있는 국내의 법령을 컴퓨터가 이해 가능한 수준의 정보로 변환 되어 법령 지식 베이스로 활용 가능하다. In this paper, we propose an OWL DL mapping rules for construction legal ontology based on the analyzed relationship between the structural features and elements of the statute. The mapping rule to be proposed is the method building the structure of the domestic statute, unique attribute of the statute, and reference relation between laws with TBox, and the legal sentence is analyzed, and the pattern type of the sentence is selected. It expresses with ABox. The proposed mapping rule is transformed to the information in which the computer can process the domestic legal document. It is usable for the legal knowledge base.

Ontology and gnoseology of legal reality: current state of a problem in Ukraine

In this article the current state of research such legal category as «legal reality» is exposed to the analysis. Achievements and miscalculations of domestic science are critically comprehended. Thus the conclusion becomes that this concept should be considered in the light of development of philosophical and theoretical thought from a position legal ontology and gnoseology.

Formation of students personal knowledge space in the distance learning

The article describes a study of features of formation Personal Knowledge Space. There was analyzed the components of the Knowledge Space. A conclusion is made that tool for integrate various resources into a single structure can be ontology. Legal knowledge ontology is considered as the main link of model of Personal Knowledge Space. The characteristics of the software package that implements the ontology in the domain of law are presented. Figs.: 1. Refs.: 12 titles. Keywords: personal knowledge space; domain of law; ontology; model.

Semantic Web Regulatory Models: Why Ethics Matter

The notion of validity fulfils a crucial role in legal theory. In the emerging Web 3.0, Semantic Web languages, legal ontologies, and normative multi-agent systems (nMAS) are designed to cover new regulatory needs. Conceptual models for complex regulatory systems shape the characteristic features of rules, norms, and principles in different ways. This article outlines one of such multilayered governance models, designed for the CAPER platform, and offers a definition of Semantic Web Regulatory Models (SWRM). It distinguishes between normative-SWRM and institutional-SWRM. It also compares existing principles in privacy by design, linked open data (LOD), legal information institutes (LII), and online dispute resolution (ODR). The article concludes by proposing the notion of Relational Law to summarize the ethical dimension of SWRM. Ethics are the only regulatory way to constitute a global space, out of the jurisdictional public domain set by national, international, or transnational law, and opposed to the private one.

‘From the Footstool to the Throne of God’: Methexis, Metaxu, and Eros in Richard Hooker’s of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity

ABSTRACT Commentators have commonly noted the metaphysical role of participation (methexis) in Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity: participation both describes how creation is suspended from God and also how believers share in Christ through grace. Yet, the role in Hooker’s thought of the attendant Platonic language of ‘between’ (metaxu) and ‘desire’ (eros) has not received sustained attention. Metaxu describes the ‘in-between’ quality of participation: the participant and the participated remain distinct but are dynamically related as the former originates from and returns to the perfection of the latter. Within this metaxological dynamic, desire (eros) acts as the physical and psychic motor driving the move between potentiality and perfect actuality, that is to say from multiplicity to divine unity: desire aims at goodness and so ultimately tends towards that which is goodness itself, namely God’s nature. For Hooker, desire becomes couched in amorous affectivity and has an erotic register. This essay explores, then, how Hooker appeals to a language of ‘between’ and ‘desire’ within his accounts of participation. First, it examines how human beings exist between the footstool and throne of God in Hooker’s legal ontology. Here, angelic desire acts as a hierarchical pattern of and spur to erotic participation in the divine nature. Second, this essay examines how theurgy transforms desire in Hooker’s account of liturgical participation as a redemptive commerce between heaven and earth. Here, angels still act as invisible, hierarchical intermediaries within earthly worship, but soon give way to immediate grace through participation in Christ within the sacraments.

Learning from syntax generalizations for automatic semantic annotation

Nowadays, there is a huge amount of textual data coming from on-line social communities like Twitter or encyclopedic data provided by Wikipedia and similar platforms. This Big Data Era created novel challenges to be faced in order to make sense of large data storages as well as to efficiently find specific information within them. In a more domain-specific scenario like the management of legal documents, the extraction of semantic knowledge can support domain engineers to find relevant information in more rapid ways, and to provide assistance within the process of constructing application-based legal ontologies. In this work, we face the problem of automatically extracting structured knowledge to improve semantic search and ontology creation on textual databases. To achieve this goal, we propose an approach that first relies on well-known Natural Language Processing techniques like Part-Of-Speech tagging and Syntactic Parsing. Then, we transform these information into generalized features that aim at capturing the surrounding linguistic variability of the target semantic units. These new featured data are finally fed into a Support Vector Machine classifier that computes a model to automate the semantic annotation. We first tested our technique on the problem of automatically extracting semantic entities and involved objects within legal texts. Then, we focus on the identification of hypernym relations and definitional sentences, demonstrating the validity of the approach on different tasks and domains.

A crowdsourcing approach to building a legal ontology from text

This article focuses on the problems of application of artificial intelligence to represent legal knowledge. The volume of legal knowledge used in practice is unusually large, and therefore the ontological knowledge representation is proposed to be used for semantic analysis, presentation and use of common vocabulary, and knowledge integration of problem domain. At the same time some features of legal knowledge representation in Ukraine have been taken into account. The software package has been developed to work with the ontology. The main features of the program complex, which has a Web-based interface and supports multi-user filling of the knowledge base, have been described. The crowdsourcing method is due to be used for filling the knowledge base of legal information. The success of this method is explained by the self-organization principle of information. However, as a result of such collective work a number of errors are identified, which are distributed throughout the structure of the ontology. The results of application of this program complex are discussed in the end of the article and the ways of improvement of the considered technique are planned.