Piercarlo Rossi

Eunomos, a legal document and knowledge management system for the Web to provide relevant, reliable and up-to-date information on the law

This paper describes the Eunomos software, an advanced legal document and knowledge management system, based on legislative XML and ontologies. We describe the challenges of legal research in an increasingly complex, multi-level and multi-lingual world and how the Eunomos software helps users cut through the information overload to get the legal information they need in an organized and structured way and keep track of the state of the relevant law on any given topic. Using NLP tools to semi-automate the lower-skill tasks makes this ambitious project a realistic commercial prospect as it helps keep costs down while at the same time allowing greater coverage. We describe the core system from workflow and technical perspectives, and discuss applications of the system for various user groups.

Eunomos, a legal document and knowledge management system to build legal services

We introduce the Eunomos software, an advanced legal document management system with terminology management. We describe the challenges of legal research in an increasingly complex, multi-level and multi-lingual world and how the Eunomos software helps expert users keep track of the state of the relevant law on any given topic. We will describe in particular the editorial process for building legal knowledge.

Eunomos, A Legal Document and Knowledge Management System for Regulatory Compliance

Legal ontology is one of the most researched areas of Artificial Intelligence & Law, but is less applied in the commercial world. This is mainly due to a historical focus on general purpose legal ontologies that do not capture the variety of definitions and interpretations that apply in different contexts, and a focus on automated extraction over manual verification in a domain where accuracy is of utmost importance. In this paper, we show how the use of a domain-specific ontology within a sophisticated legal monitoring software managed by legal experts can help compliance officers in banks and insurance companies comply with strict regulatory duties in a highly complex and constantly evolving area of law.

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.

A critical analysis of legal requirements engineering from the perspective of legal practice

This paper reviews existing approaches to representing legal knowledge for legal requirements engineering. Legal requirement methodologies are rarely developed together with legal practitioners, with the result that often approaches are based on a simplified view of law which prevents their acceptance by legal practitioners. In this paper, we analyse how legal practitioners build legal knowledge and possibilities for existing approaches in RELaw to mirror legal practice.

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).

The Multi-Layered Legal Information Perspective

This paper tries to lay the basis for a procedural model that could contribute to improve the interoperability of legal ontologies. At the same time it focuses on critical points of current use of legal ontologies due to the fact that often the practice of law is disregarded.

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.