Semantic Web for the Legal Domain: The next step

Abstract

Abstract. Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a more general understanding of law is bringing into view a new landscape in which general legal frameworks -grounded in well-known legal theories stemming from 20th-century c. legal positivism or sociological jurisprudence -are made compatible with specific forms of rights management on the Web. In this sense, Semantic Web tools are not only being designed for information retrieval, classification, clustering, and knowledge management. They can also be understood as regulatory tools, i.e. as components of the contemporary legal architecture, to be used by multiple stakeholders -front-line practitioners, policymakers, legal drafters, companies, market agents, and citizens. That is the issue broadly addressed in this Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, overviewing the work carried out over the last fifteen years, and seeking to foster new research in this field, beyond the state of the art.

Legal document similarity: a multi-criteria decision-making perspective

“…Ontology, a branch of AI, is widely used to facilitate effective knowledge management in the legal domain (Saravanan, Ravindran & Raman, 2009). Knowledge engineering using semantic web and ontology for specific sub-domains of law is practiced popularly (Casanovas et al, 2016) due to the ease of modeling legal actors, agents, and relationships using these technologies. With the advents in other technological domains, legal ontological solutions are also upgraded to incorporate more scalable, re-usable, context-aware and usercentered approaches in the existing framework.…”

Introduction to Linked Data

“…SeeCasanovas (2015), andCasanovas et al (2016) for a comprehensive state of the art of Semantic Web applications in the legal domain.5http://www.constituteproject.org/.1.4 Government and the Web of Data…”

Application of an Ecosystem Methodology Based on Legal Language Processing for the Transformation of Court Decisions and Legal Opinions into Open Data

“…It is noteworthy that some researchers explicitly classify legal documents as Big Data since they meet at least two of the major aspects of Big Data: volume and variety [6]. While several governments are taking steps to apply semantic web technologies in the legal publishing domain (e.g., the legislation.gov.uk platform where UK legislation is published in XML and RDF) [7], in most countries these documents are usually made available in unstructured or poorly structured formats; for example, as PDF files, HTML documents, or plain text.On the other hand, the current trend of Open Data requires that government data (legal documents being a special category of them) are published without technical and legal impediments, in structured and machine-processable formats, and under an open license. Janssen et al [8] have discussed in detail the expected benefits from the adoption of the Open Data model: transparency, democratic accountability, economic growth, stimulation of innovation, creation of new services, improved decision and policy making, equal access to data, etc.…”

“…It is noteworthy that some researchers explicitly classify legal documents as Big Data since they meet at least two of the major aspects of Big Data: volume and variety [6]. While several governments are taking steps to apply semantic web technologies in the legal publishing domain (e.g., the legislation.gov.uk platform where UK legislation is published in XML and RDF) [7], in most countries these documents are usually made available in unstructured or poorly structured formats; for example, as PDF files, HTML documents, or plain text.…”