Gianmaria Ajani

Multilevel legal ontologies

In order to manage the conceptual representation of European law we have proposed the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus (LTS) and the related methodology. In this paper we consider further issues that emerged during the testing and use of the LTS, and how we took them into account in the new release of the system. In particular, we address the problem of representing interpretation of terms besides the definitions occurring in the directives, the problem of normative change, and the process of planning legal reforms of European law. We show how to include into the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus the Acquis Principles - which have been sketched by scholars in European Private Law from the so-called Acquis communautaire -, how to take the temporal dimension into account in ontologies, and how to apply natural language processing techniques to the legal texts being annotated in the LTS.

Introduction: complex systems and six challenges for the development of law and the semantic web

AICOL workshops aim to bridge the multiple ways of understanding legal systems and legal reasoning in the field of AI and Law. Moreover, they pay special attention to the complexity of both legal systems and legal studies, on one hand, and the expanding power of the internet and engineering applications, on the other. Along with a fruitful interaction and exchange of methodologies and knowledge between some of the most relevant contributions to AI work on contemporary legal systems, the goal is to integrate such a discussion with legal theory, political philosophy, and empirical legal approaches. More particularly, we focus on four subjects, namely, (i) language and complex systems in law; (ii) ontologies and the representation of legal knowledge; (iii) argumentation and logics; (iv) dialogue and legal multimedia.

The European Taxonomy Syllabus: A multi-lingual, multi-level ontology framework to untangle the web of European legal terminology

The final publication is available at IOS Press through http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/AO-170174. This paper describes a new concept of legal ontology together with an ontology development tool, called European Legal Taxonomy Syllabus (ELTS). The tool is used to model the legal terminology created by the Uniform Terminology project on EU consumer protection law as an ontology. ELTS is not a formal ontology in the standard sense, i.e., an axiomatic ontology formalized, for instance, in description logic. Rather, it is a lightweight ontology, i.e. a knowledge base storing low-level legal concepts, connected via low-level semantic relations, and related to linguistic patterns that denote legal concepts in several languages spoken in the European Union (EU). In other words, ELTS is a multi-lingual and multi-jurisdictional terminological vocabulary enriched with concepts denoted by vocabulary entries, with semantic relations between different concepts. The choice of such an architecture is based on past studies in comparative law and is motivated by the need to reveal the differences between national systems within the EU. Past literature in comparative law highlights that axiomatic ontologies freeze legal knowledge in an unreal steadiness, i.e., they render it disconnected from legal practice. Much more flexibility is needed to make the knowledge base acceptable to legal practitioners. ELTS was developed together with legal practitioners on the basis of the comparative view of European law. The ontology framework is designed to help professionals study the meaning of national and European legal terms and how they inter-relate in the transposition of European Directives into national laws. The structure and user interface of ELTS is suitable for building multi-lingual, multi-jurisdictional legal ontologies in a bottom-up and collaborative manner, starting from the description of legal terms by legal experts. It also takes into account the interpretation of norms, the dynamic character of norms and the contextual character of legal concepts in that they are linked to their legal sources (legislation, case law and doctrine).

Legal Change and Economic Performance

Aim of this paper is to provide a contribution for theoretical discussion on the impact of legal change on economic reforms. While its main focus is on the effects of legal change over economic performance in Central and Eastern Europe, references are also made to different cases of competition among legal models and of resistance to supranational harmonisation, in order to pay proper attention to the issue of partial autonomy of the legal discourse from economic policies.

Sailing the semantic seas by structural vessels: problems and perspectives for the identification of implicit knowledge in the legal domain

In this paper we propose some preliminary insights on how the relationship of Law and AI affects the identification of implicit knowledge in the legal domain. From a theoretical point of view, the notion of knowledge, as conceived in AI, is problematical for law, because it cannot be solved making recourse to a dominant theory on truth. As it is known, the current state of legal research is fragmented, not only on the issue of identifying truth, but more generally on the issue of evaluating the relationships between formalism and informalism in law. in diverse theories of truth. From an operational point of view, new advances in terms of social network analysis could be fruitful to knowledge discovery in the legal domain, especially for application of legal ontologies in multicultural contexts.