Radboud Winkels

MetaLex XML and the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format

Electronic government invariably involves XML and electronic law: legislation is as essential to public administration as the ball is to a ball game. This paper gives an overview of two XML standard proposals dealing with two complementary aspects of electronic legislation - the documents themselves as a carrier, and an institutional reality they represent - in a coherent way: MetaLex XML and the Legal Knowledge Interchange format (LKIF). MetaLex XML is well on its way to becoming formal and de facto standard for legislation in XML. LKIF is yet to be submitted as a proposed standard. LKIF includes some interesting innovations from an AI & Law perspective

Legal Ontologies in Knowledge Engineering and Information Management

In this article we describe two core ontologies of law that specify knowledge that is common to all domains of law. The first one, FOLaw describes and explains dependencies between types of knowledge in legal reasoning; the second one, LRI-Core ontology, captures the main concepts in legal information processing. Although FOLaw has shown to be of high practical value in various applied European ICT projects, its reuse is rather limited as it is rather concerned with the structure of legal reasoning than with legal knowledge itself: as many other “legal core ontologies”, FOLaw is therefore rather an epistemological framework than an ontology. Therefore, we also developed LRI-Core. As we argue here that legal knowledge is based to a large extend on common-sense knowledge, LRI-Core is particularly inspired by research on abstract common-sense concepts. The main categories of LRI-Core are: physical, mental and abstract concepts. Roles cover in particular social worlds. Another special category are occurrences; terms that denote events and situations. We illustrate the use of LRI-Core with an ontology for Dutch criminal law, developed in the e-Court European project.

Proposal for a Dutch Legal XML Standard

This paper presents a proposal for an XML Standard for legal sources in the Netherlands. The standard intends to provide a generic and easily extensible framework for the XML encoding of the structure and contents of legal and paralegal documents. It differs from other existing metadata schemes for legal documents in two respects; It is language-independent and it aims to accommodate uses of XML beyond search and presentation services.

Automated classification of norms in sources of law

The research described here attempts to achieve automated support for modelling sources of law for legal knowledge based systems and services. Many existing systems use models that do not reflect the entire law, and simplify parts of the text. These models are difficult to validate, maintain and re-use. We propose to create an intermediate model that has an isomorphic representation of the structure of the original text. A first step towards automated modelling is the detection and classification of provisions in sources of law. A list of different categories of norms and provisions that are used in Dutch legal texts is presented. These categories can be identified by the use of typical text patterns. Next, the results of experiments in automated classification of provisions using these patterns are presented. 91% of 592 sentences in fifteen different Dutch laws were classified correctly. Some conclusions about the generality of the approach are drawn and future research is outlined.

MetaVex: Regulation Drafting Meets the Semantic Web

Currently almost all legislative bodies throughout Europe use general purpose word-processing software for the drafting of legal documents. These regular word processors do not provide specific support for legislative drafters and parliamentarians to facilitate the legislative process. Furthermore, they do not natively support metadata on regulations. This paper describes how the MetaLex regulation-drafting environment (MetaVex) aims to meet such requirements.

Constructing a semantic network for legal content

The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA) is one of many organizations that deal with a multitude of electronic legal data, from various sources and in different formats. In this paper, we describe the results of a study aimed at better access to these sources by having a supplier and format independent knowledge store that describes the sources and their interrelations in a semantic network. Furthermore we developed parsers to automatically detect the identity of sources and typed references within the sources to other legal documents. These parsers can be used to fill and update the semantic network as new documents are added.

Determining Authority of Dutch Case Law

In this paper we present the results of two studies to see whether the analysis of the network of citations between cases can be used as an indication of the relevance and authority in the Dutch legal system. Fowler e.a. have shown such results for the US common law system, but given the different status of case law in continental tradition it is not clear whether this will hold in the Netherlands. Moreover, we introduce a way to validate the results using selections made by human experts for legal education. We discuss the results and conclude that network analysis of cases is a useful tool for legal research.

Making sense of legal texts

Er wordt met succes gewerkt aan allerlei computersystemen om wet- en regelgeving makkelijker toegankelijk te maken. Portals en zoekmachines maken het makkelijker om relevante stukken tekst te vinden; expertsystemen helpen met het toepassen van de regels. Echter, om deze systemen te kunnen gebruiken, moet de regelgeving aan het systeem worden toegevoegd. Dit betekent dat de structuur van de regels moet worden gemarkeerd in HTML of XML, of dat er computermodellen van de tekst moeten worden gemaakt. Emile de Maat onderzocht in hoeverre dit markeren van teksten en het maken van modellen geautomatiseerd kan worden. Hierbij keek hij uitsluitend naar Nederlandse wetteksten. De Maat bestudeerde een aantal verschillende taken: het bepalen van de structuur van de wettekst, het vinden van verwijzingen in de wettekst, het classificeren van zinnen in de wettekst, het modelleren van die zinnen en het samenvoegen van de losse modellen voor de zinnen tot een model voor de gehele wet. De Maat concludeert

Automated legislative drafting: generating paraphrases of legislation

In this paper, we describe which roles deep structures of law play in (automatic) drafting legislation. Deep structures contain a formal description of the intended normative effects of a new regulation. We discuss mechanisms that can be used to generate different paraphrases of regulations. Since it is possible to test the paraphrases on legal knowledge based systems, we have provided two extra design steps in legislative drafting which can be supported by automated tools. Deep structures are straightforward descriptions of the normative effects of regulations. Each deep structure distinguishes desired and undesired behaviour, and has no further internal structure, such ss paragraphs or exception structures. This paper describes methods to translate a deep structure into representations of different types of codes, i.e. paraphrases. Each representation of a code hsa a different surface structure, according to the choice we make during the translation regarding: a) the initial assumptions of the regulation, i.e. modelling from desired or undesired behaviour, b) the level of abstraction, c) the viewpoint of the law, i.e. the category of norm subjects, and d) the type of deontic modalities the regulation largely uses. All paraphrases have the same ‘effects’ sa the deep structure, but with different features, and are suitable for different gords.

What’s in an ITS? A Functional Decomposition

The status of the research in the area of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) has become ambiguous. The history of ITS research is rich, and especially in the 70s it was fundamental AI research, but now it is more and more applied AI. This means that many of the modern AI techniques are lacking. From [34] it is difficult to distil a unifying conception of ITS research. Literature of the 80s is descriptive rather than technical or theoretical. There are almost no attempts towards unification or formalization; on the contrary, there seems to be more confusion about what an ITS is about and what it is made of. In this paper we try to answer this last question by presenting, what we think the functional decomposition of ITS should look like, and we contrast it with the traditional “3-expert” framework that emerges from literature.