Pompeu Casanovas

Law and the Semantic Web

Context of the Book.- Law and the Semantic Web, an Introduction.- Introduction: Legal Informatics and the Conceptions of the Law.- Statistical Study of Judicial Practices.- Theoretical Papers: Legal Ontologies and Methodologies.- Use and Reuse of Legal Ontologies in Knowledge Engineering and Information Management.- Types and Roles of Legal Ontologies.- CAUSATI O NT : Modeling Causation in AI&Law.- A Constructive Framework for Legal Ontologies.- On the Ontological Status of Norms.- Building Legal Ontologies with METHONTOLOGY and WebODE.- Institutional Pragmatics and Legal Ontology Limits of the Descriptive Approach of Texts.- Practice Papers: Information Retrieval and Applications.- Using NLP Techniques to Identify Legal Ontology Components: Concepts and Relations.- A Methodology to Create Legal Ontologies in a Logic Programming Information Retrieval System.- Iuriservice: An Intelligent Frequently Asked Questions System to Assist Newly Appointed Judges.- NetCase: An Intelligent System to Assist Legal Services Providers in Transnational Legal Networks.- No Model Behaviour: Ontologies for Fraud Detection.

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...

AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

This introduction presents the principles and fundamentals of the AICOL scientific initiative and in particular the main contributions of the current volume, underlining the interdisciplinary approach and the variety of adopted methodologies.

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.

Concepts and Fields of Relational Justice

This paper intends to introduce and explore the broad conceptual background of relational justice according to the current state of the art. Relational Justice(RJ) is defined as the justice produced through cooperative behavior, agreement, negotiation, or dialogue among actors in a post-conflict situation. We found concepts stemming from at least thirty different fields, going from behavioral sciences (neurology, brain sciences, primatology, social psychology, etc.) to criminology, jurisprudence, and philosophy. One of these contributing fields is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which uses several techniques to grasp the practical knowledge of negotiators and mediators and builds tools to support both negotiation and mediation processes. However, contrary to the legal ontologies field, there are no developed ontologies of Relational Justice yet representing the conceptual richness of the domain.

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.

Law and the semantic web, an introduction

In this paper, we introduce the role of Semantic Web technology for the legal domain. We will briefly discuss the current use of Information Technology in the legal domain, followed by an introduction to the Semantic Web. We then will put forward what we see as the particularities of the legal domain that need to be taken into account by technological solutions. Finally, we will explain how the articles in this volume contribute to the application of Semantic Web technology in the legal domain.

Crowdsourcing Tools for Disaster Management: A Review of Platforms and Methods

Recent advances on information technologies and communications, coupled with the advent of the social media applications have fuelled a new landscape of emergency and disaster response systems by enabling affected citizens to generate georeferenced real time information on critical events. The identification and analysis of such events is not straightforward and the application of crowdsourcing methods or automatic tools is needed for that purpose. Whereas crowdsourcing makes emphasis on the resources of people to produce, aggregate, or filter original data, automatic tools make use of information retrieval techniques to analyze publicly available information. This paper reviews a set of online tools and platforms implemented in recent years which are currently being applied in the area of emergency management and proposes a taxonomy for its categorization.

Iuriservice: an intelligent frequently asked questions system to assist newly appointed judges

In this paper, we describe the use of legal ontologies as a basis to improve IT support for professional judges. In the ontology, we emphasize the importance of professional knowledge and experience as an important pillar for constructing the ontology. We describe an intelligent FAQ system for junior judges that intensively uses the ontology.