Legal Ontologies in Knowledge Engineering and Information Management

Abstract

In this article we describe two core ontologies of law that specify knowledge that is common to all domains of law. The first one, FOLaw describes and explains dependencies between types of knowledge in legal reasoning; the second one, LRI-Core ontology, captures the main concepts in legal information processing. Although FOLaw has shown to be of high practical value in various applied European ICT projects, its reuse is rather limited as it is rather concerned with the structure of legal reasoning than with legal knowledge itself: as many other ''legal core ontologies'', FOLaw is therefore rather an epistemological framework than an ontology. Therefore, we also developed LRI-Core. As we argue here that legal knowledge is based to a large extend on common-sense knowledge, LRI-Core is particularly inspired by research on abstract commonsense concepts. The main categories of LRI-Core are: physical, mental and abstract concepts. Roles cover in particular social worlds. Another special category are occurrences; terms that denote events and situations. We illustrate the use of LRI-Core with an ontology for Dutch criminal law, developed in the e-Court European project.

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

“…In a similar vein, Lame 2004; Saias and Quaresma 2004;Peters 2009) apply a range of natural language processing techniques to corpora of legal texts (usually legislation) in order to identify or enrich legal ontologies; they report varying degrees of success, with much work remaining. The Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF) takes a broad scope, encompassing abstract elements of legal knowledge and upper level ontologies, but does not include cases (Breuker et al 2004;Hoekstra et al 2007Hoekstra et al , 2009.…”

“…Given instances of the classes, we have a knowledge base. Ontologies have proven to be useful in the legal domain (Gruber 1993;Bench-Capon and Visser 1996;Kralingen et al 1999;Breuker et al 2004;Valente 2005;Sartor 2006;Hoekstra et al 2009). …”

Emerging AI & Law approaches to automating analysis and retrieval of electronically stored information in discovery proceedings

“…Detailed legal ontologies could serve as a basis for indexing schemes required to make legal sense of the electronic documents discovered; such legal ontologies can seed the hypothesis ontologies to be fleshed out from the electronic documents in the corpus and in user modeling (see, e.g., Breuker et al 2004). The core ontology, including the more general concepts of knowledge transmission in corporate or commercial settings, would be available to serve other users in other cases.…”

Towards a framework for law-compliant software requirements

“…In the Business domain, it was estimated that organisations would spend $5.8 billion in one year alone (2005) to ensure compliance of their reporting and risk management procedures with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX, for short) 2 .…”

“…This makes an important step forward in dealing with the complexity and syntactic ambiguity of legal sources. About legal concepts, the LRI-Core [2] is a layered ontology of law, rooted in a foundational ontology that can be instantiated into domain ontologies. It is founded on the thesis that law is driven by common world concepts and words, and as such the ontology contains concepts such as agent, action, organisation, and so on, together with legal concepts.…”