Legal reasoning, the core of legal practice in many countries, is “stare decisis” and its soundness is usually strengthened by relevant case law consulted. However, the task of relevant case law access and retrieval is tiring to legal practitioners and constitutes a serious drain on their productivity. Existing efforts at addressing this problem are conceptional, restrictive or unreliable. Specifically, existing semantic retrieval (SR) systems for case law are desirous of exceptional retrieval precision. Ontology promises to meet this desire, if introduced to the SR system. As a consequence, an ontology-based SR system for case law has been built using the systems analysis and design methodology. In particular, the component-based software engineering and the agile methodologies are employed to implement the system. Finally, the search and retrieval performance of the resultant SR system has been evaluated using the heuristics evaluation method. The retrieval system has shown to have a search and retrieval performance of about 94 % precision, 80 % recall and 84 % F-measure. Overall, the paper implements the SR system for case law with excellent precision and affirms the superiority of ontology approach over other semantic approaches to SR systems for document retrieval in the legal domain.
Verifying a citizen's birth information is predominantly weighted with rigorous processes due to the multitude of birth registration centres and the method of birth registration and archiving its records are operationally manual within the nation. Consequently, this approach is systematically prone to destruction, falsification, alteration, or duplication of birth records and thus, this paper proposed and developed an electronic system for birth registration and record management. It adopted the system analysis and design (SAD) methodology suitably for its designs and implementation. The dataflow diagram (DFD) was adopted for its design while its implementation involved several client and server side development tools: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Java Script and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), Hypertext Pre-Processor (PHP) and My Structured Query Language (MySQL). The resultant prototype system was tested and evaluated entirely, and it demonstrated the capability of birth registration, its records management, and also checking its associated challenges-verification, retrieval, duplications, etc. On full deployment, it will curb the rampart falsification of birth information in Nigeria.
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