Núria Casellas

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 and DILIGENT: ontology modeling in a distributed environment

In the legal domain, ontologies enjoy quite some reputation as a way to model normative knowledge about laws and jurisprudence. This paper describes the methodology followed when developing the ontology used by the second version of the prototype Iuriservice, a web-based intelligent FAQ for judicial use. This modeling methodology has had two important requirements: on the one hand, the ontology needed to be extracted from a repository of professional judicial knowledge (containing nearly 800 questions regarding daily practice). Thus, the construction of ontologies of professional judicial knowledge demanded the description of this knowledge as it is perceived by the judge. On the other hand, due to the distributiveness of the environment, there was a need for controlled discussion and traceability of the arguments used in favor or against the introduction of a concept X as part of the domain ontology. This paper presents the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK), extracted manually from the selection of relevant terms from judicial practice questions and modeled according to the DILIGENT methodology. We will show that DILIGENT has proved to be a methodology that facilitates the ontology engineering in a distributed environment, although appropriate tool support needs to be developed.

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.

Ontology Evaluation through Usability Measures

Current ontology methodologies offer guidance towards knowledge acquisition, ontology development (design and conceptualization), formalization, evaluation, evolution and maintenance. Nevertheless, these methodologies describe most of expert involvements within ontology validation rather vaguely. The use of tailored usability methods for ontology evaluation could offer the establishment of certain quality measurements and aid the evaluation of modelling decisions, prior ontology implementation. This paper describes the experimental evaluation of a legal ontology, the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK), with the SUS questionnaire, a usability evaluation questionnaire tailored to ontology evaluation.

Computable Models of the Law and ICT: State of the Art and Trends in European Research

This volume is devoted to the presentation of several research contributions from some significant European research projects in the domain of legal technologies. In this domain European research has been particularly active in the last years, often achieving global leadership. This is due to the commitment of individual researchers, research centers and universities, but also to the support of the European Union that in various research programs has devoted a significant attention (and some relevant financing) to legal technologies, considering them a decisive aspect of E-government and a crucial resource for the development of the information society.

Methodologies, Tools and Languages for Ontology Design

How do we build an ontology? This chapter offers a review of some of the most important ontology development methodologies, tools and languages, and suggests an expert-based approach to the development of professional knowledge-based legal ontologies.

Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective

This paper shows the multiple relationships between empirical data and semantic content in the legal field. One of the well-known problems of ontology construction is the “knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem” pointed out many years ago by Edward Feigenbaum and others. This problem has not been completely solved in the next generation of Semantic Web developments. It is our contention that both an accurate description of the legal environment and well-grounded previous sociological studies may help to address it in a more satisfactory way. This means adopting a user-centered approach to legal ontologies, in what we will call an “iterative and integrated pragmatic cycle” involving legal theorists, socio-legal researchers, professional people (lawyers, magistrates, prosecutors…) and computer scientists. We describe the example of how the ontology of iuriservice was built up.

ODR, Ontologies, and Web 2.0

Online communities and institutions create new spaces for interaction, but also open new avenues for the emergence of grievances, claims, and disputes. Consequently, online dispute resolution (ODR) procedures are core to these new online worlds. But can ODR mechanisms provide sufficient levels of reputation, trust, and enforceability for it to become mainstream? This contribution introduces the new approaches to ODR and provides a description of the design and structure of Ontomedia, a web-based platform to facilitate online mediation in different domains.