A legal case OWL ontology with an instantiation of Popov v. Hayashi

Abstract

The paper provides an OWL ontology for legal cases with an instantiation of the legal case Popov v. Hayashi. The ontology makes explicit the conceptual knowledge of the legal case domain, supports reasoning about the domain, and can be used to annotate the text of cases, which in turn can be used to populate the ontology. A populated ontology is a case base which can be used for information retrieval, information extraction, and case based reasoning. The ontology contains not only elements for indexing the case (e.g. the parties, jurisdiction, and date), but as well elements used to reason to a decision such as argument schemes and the components input to the schemes. We use the Protégé ontology editor and knowledge acquisition system, current guidelines for ontology development, and tools for visual and linguistic presentation of the ontology.

Logic in the Theory and Practice of Lawmaking

“…One approach is to provide a legal ontology in OWL such as Wyner and Hoekstra (2012), though this is for case reasoning and not legislation. An ontology is a formal knowledge representation of the entities, properties, and relations in some domain (Noy and McGuinness 2000).…”

Waste Management Information System - An Expert System Using Ontologies

“…Khadraoui et al present guidelines for the development of an eGovernment Information System ontology towards an eGovernment Information System (Khadraoui et al, 2005). (Breuker et al, 2004), (Cheng et al, 2008), (Lame, 2005), (Wyner and Hoekstra, 2012), (Wyner, 2008), (van Heijst, 1995) In JUMAS 1 (Judicial Management by Digital Libriaries Semantics) project, which is a European Union supported research project between 2008 and 2011, tools and methods are developed for semantic enrichment of legal documents (via annotation) for easy discovery and presentation of legal document and multimedia libraries (audio and video). They developed a query expansion method and prototype implementation based on ontologies (Sartori and Palmonari, 2010).…”

A Semantic Retrieval System for Case Law

“…The success achieved in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) particularly in building expert systems in various domains such as medicine and biotechnology amongst others made it apparent that human expertise could be substituted with systems codifying the human expert's know-how. The legal profession did not also escape this admiration for experts' know-how codification [9] and, as a result, the research efforts in computational law were geared towards codifying legal expert's know-how [1], [11], [13], [16]- [18]. Codifying legal expert's know-how is salutary but the adoption of its resultant systems will be seriously threatened by the nature of law and the legal practice [5], [19].…”

“…Legal reasoning, a critical part of legal practice, is strongly case-based, i.e., "stare decisis" [3], [6], [14], [18], and, thus, legal reasoning and judicial verdicts are both strengthened but further complicated by available case law that obviously increases with time in every judicial system. The study [26] established that the efficiency and the effectiveness of legal reasoning processes and judicial verdicts were influenced by how case law was stored, accessed and retrieved; and clamoured alongside the likes of [2], [3], [8], [13], [14], [18], and [24] for a semantic representation of legal information. These experts showed that only such a representation would allow for an excellently efficient and effective processing or handling of legal information by both man and machine.…”