Mercedes Blázquez

Supporting newly‐appointed judges: a legal knowledge management case study

Purpose – In this paper we describe the process of developing and implementing a knowledge management system for the Spanish judicial domain. Spanish judges, especially newly‐recruited ones, hold a solid background of theoretical legal knowledge, but are much less familiar with the judicial knowledge of the more senior judges acquired from everyday practice and case resolution. The aim of this development is to capture and model these two aspects of judicial knowledge – theoretical and practical – for knowledge browsing and retrieving.Design/methodology/approach – Semantic web technologies are applied to feed a question‐answering system based on ontologies of professional legal knowledge (OPLK).Findings – There is a kind of specific legal knowledge, which belongs properly to the expert domain, not being captured by current legal core ontologies, i.e. Judges require clues, hints or well‐grounded practical guidelines that refer to the problem they have before them when they put a question or start the query...

OPJK into PROTON: legal domain ontology integration into an upper-level ontology

The SEKT Project aims at developing and exploiting the knowledge technologies which underlie the Next Generation Knowledge Management, connecting complementary know-how of key European centers in three areas: Ontology Management Technology, Knowledge Discovery and Human Language Technology. This paper describes the development of PROTON, an upper-level ontology developed by Ontotext, and of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK), modeled by a team of legal experts form the Institute of Law and Technology (IDT-UAB) for the Iuriservice prototype (a webbased intelligent FAQ for the Spanish judges on their first appointment designed by iSOCO). The paper focuses on the work done towards the integration of the OPJK built using a middle-out strategy into the system and top modules of PROTON, illustrating the flexibility of this independent upper-level ontology.

Semantic enhancement for legal information retrieval: Iuriservice performance

The Iuriservice application offers a semantically enabled FAQ search system and case law browser for the Spanish judges in their first appointment. The system is now at the first stage of implementation in the Spanish Judicial School. Users may input questions to the system in natural language to obtain access to a database of experience-based answers to practical day-to-day questions. In order to offer the question-answer pair from the application database that best matches the input question, the search system is enhanced using ontologies and semantic distance calculation. This paper will focus on the description of these technologies, bringing user needs and ontologies to the spotlight, and will show current effectiveness and efficiency results regarding the performance of the FAQ search engine. These results illustrate the enhancement that may be provided by semantic technologies for information retrieval in comparison with other techniques.

Iuriservice II: ontology development and architectural design

This paper shows the ontology development for the second version of the prototype Iuriservice II, an i-FAQ for judicial use containing a repository of professional judicial knowledge. We define the epistemological and ontological levels as separate issues. The domain and middle-out ontology will be connected to the SEKT top and upper level ontology PROTON. In the second part of the paper, we introduce a refinement of the architectural design, especially conceived to improve the user/system interaction by using searching, scoring and matching algorithms for a multidisciplinary ontological processing.

Skills Management in Knowledge-Intensive Organizations

In order for organizations to survive on increasingly competitive and global markets, adequate management of intellectual capital is essential. Although increasingly more information is found in electronic formats, turning this information into valuable knowledge is still the responsibility of people by applying it in professional situations to generate value. In this paper, we describe an approach and software tool to accompany organizations in the Knowledge Economy, where intellectual capital is the principal asset for organizations. In our approach we view people as sellers of knowledge, while departments, projects, profiles, and organizations are viewed as knowledge buyers. Together they constitute a knowledge market where the goods to be traded are competencies. The identification of knowledge gaps forms an important event to undertake action to compensate for the lack of competencies (training, new hiring, promoting, etc.).

The e-Sentencias Prototype: A Procedural Ontology for Legal Multimedia Applications in the Spanish Civil Courts

Search, retrieval, and management of multimedia contents are challenging tasks for users and researchers alike. We introduce a software-hardware system for the global management of the multimedia contents produced by Spanish Civil Courts. The ultimate goal is to obtain an automatic classification of images and segments of the audiovisual records that, coupled with textual semantics, allows an efficient navigation and retrieval of judicial documents and additional legal sources. This paper describes our knowledge acquisition process, sets a typology of Spanish Civil hearings as performed in practice, and a preliminary procedural ontology at its actual stage of development (e-Sentencias ontology). A discussion on procedural, contextual and multimedia ontologies is also provided.

Semantic Technology for Professional Judicial Knowledge

An iFAQ (intelligent Frequently Asked Questions) system designed to provide assistance to young judges at their first appointment is described. The development and use of legal domain ontologies is described. The functionality of the system is set out, along with the system architecture. The methodology and results of a system evaluation are also reported.