Using ontologies for comparing and harmonizing legislation

Abstract

In the last decades the interest in the problem of comparing and harmonizing legislation has been steadily increasing. One reason is the increasing legal convergence between governments in the European Union, and the increasing traffic of people over borders of jurisdictions. Another reason is the increasing globalization of companies; Products and services are offered in many jurisdictions at the same time, and the product or service has to meet the provisions of all jurisdictions in which it is offered. In the E-POWER project relevant tax legislation and business processes are modeled in UML to improve the speed and efficiency with which the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration can implement decision support systems for internal use and for its clients. These conceptual models have also proven their usefulness for efficient and effective analysis of draft legislation. We are currently researching whether conceptual modeling can also be used to compare 'similar' legislation from different jurisdictions to improve the capacity of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration to react to future consequences of increased movement of people, products, and money between EU member states and increased harmonization between tax authorities in Europe. In addition, addressing the problem of comparing models is also expected to improve our methodology for modeling legislation. This paper discusses problems and requirements of comparing legislation as we understand them now, and attempts to relate them to relevant research.

An Activity-Based Approach towards Development and Use of E-Government Service Ontologies

“…In the area of legislation, metadata is used to facilitate integration of and access to legislative information [26]. Ontologies of law are used to formalize, compare and harmonize law in the E-power project [4], or semantic portals, which relate legislative information to its context in the legislative process in order to support information and knowledge sharing [19]. Ontologies are also suggested (e.g.…”

Merging of legal micro-ontologies from European directives

“…A common point between our approach and the OPLK, E-Court (2000E-Court ( -2003 and E-Power (2000E-Power ( -2003, Boer et al (2003) projects is integration into an existing ontology. The E-Court project aimed at developing an integrated system for the acquisition of audio-video depositions within courtrooms, the archiving of legal documents, information retrieval and synchronized audio-video text consultation.…”

Multilevel Legal Ontologies

“…The management of EUD is particularly complex, since the implementation of a EUD does not correspond to a straight transposition into a national law. Conversely, managing this kind of complexity with appropriate tools can facilitate the comparison and harmonization of national legislation [6]. For instance, the LOIS Project aimed at extending EuroWordnet with legal information, thus adopting a similar approach to multilingualism, with the goal of connecting a legal ontology to a higher level ontology [4].…”