Challenges and Related Issues for Building Chinese Legal Ontology

Abstract

Legal ontologies have made significant progress during the past 20 years, however, few of these ontologies have gone beyond the stage of advanced and refined prototypes. When building legal ontology, the challenges are not only from the deficiency of the ontology techniques, but also from the inner legal systems. The paper analyzes the challenges for building Chinese legal ontology, such as the ambiguity of legal language, the deficiency of three-stage inference for court decisions and the limited role of cases in China. Based on the challenges, the proposed legal ontology should be circular ontology between normative documents and judicial cases. In addition, we discuss the issues for constructing legal ontology: the role of legal ontology, legal modules and basic elements for legal normative document.