The maintenance of legal knowledge based systems

Abstract

Legal knowledge based systems (KBSs) are, by definition, grounded on law. Very often the relevant law is subject to routine amendment and repeal, such changes occurring at irregular and unpredictable intervals. These systems are thus particularly affected by significant problems of adaptation as a result, a fact which has limited their practical take-up. If they are to be of more practical use the maintenance issues associated with these systems must be taken seriously. In this paper we discuss the issues associated with the maintenance of legal KBSs and describe a suite of maintenance tools designed to address these issues.

A Survey on Legal Question Answering Systems

“…The most popular form of the structured source is Legal Knowledge Bases (LKBs) (Bench-Capon & Coenen, 1992). The LKBs are knowledge management systems being able to describe legal entities and the relationships between them.…”

Selected Aspects of Temporal Knowledge Engineering

“…The most commonly known domains, in which there is a need for an explicit time notion, are: natural language processing (NLP), planning, robotics, image processing, medical diagnosis, and law [1], [2]. In all of the above mentioned domains, change has a primary meaning.…”

“…Many AI systems concern the currently changing economic environment (see e.g. [2]). Therefore, if the decisions taken on the basis of system's advice are to be correct, the system has to take into account the temporal dimension of information, the changes of information in time and has to be aware of the nature of those changes [1].…”