Approaches to Legal Ontologies
Theories, Domains, Methodologies
Giovanni Sartor, Pompeu Casanovas, Maria Angela Biasiotti, Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
Legal ontologies have proved crucial for representing, processing and retrieving legal information, and will acquire an increasing significance in the emerging framework of the Semantic Web. Despite the many research projects in the field, a collective reflection on the theoretical foundations of legal ontology engineering was still missing. This book bridges the gap, by exploring current methodologies and theoretical approaches to legal ontologies. It gathers 16 papers, each of them presenting issues and solutions for ontology engineering related to a particular approach to, or aspect of, the law: comparative law, case-based reasoning, multilingualism, complex- systems, sociolegal analysis, legal theory, social ontology, ontology learning, computational ontology, service ontology, cognitive science, document modelling, large legal databases, scientific, linguistic and legal-technology perspectives. The book will thus interest researchers in legal informatics, artificial intelligence and law, legal theory, legal philosophy, legal sociology, comparative law, as well as developers of applications based on the intelligent management of legal information, in both e-commerce and e-government (e-administration, e-justice, e-democracy).
Table of Contents Introduction: Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engineering: Experiences and Future Directions - pages 1-14 - Casanovas, Pompeu (et al.)
The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies - pages 15-47 - Fernández-Barrera, Meritxell (et al.)
Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective - pages 49-67 - Casanovas, Pompeu (et al.)
A Cognitive Science Perspective on Legal Ontologies - pages 69-81 - Breuker, Joost (et al.)
Social Ontology and Documentality - pages 83-97 - Ferraris, Maurizio
The Case-Based Reasoning Approach: Ontologies for Analogical Legal Argument - pages 99-115 - Ashley, Kevin D.
A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks - pages 117-132 - Mazzega, Pierre (et al.)
The Multi-Layered Legal Information Perspective - pages 133-141 - Boella, Guido (et al.)
Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective - pages 143-166 - Biasiotti, Maria Angela (et al.)
A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling - pages 167-178 - Palmirani, Monica (et al.)
From Thesaurus Towards Ontologies in Large Legal Databases - pages 179-200 - Ferrer, Ángel Sancho (et al.)
The Computational Ontology Perspective: Design Patterns for Web Ontologies - pages 201-217 - Gangemi, Aldo (et al.)
A Learning Approach for Knowledge Acquisition in the Legal Domain - pages 219-233 - Francesconi, Enrico
Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective - pages 235-258 - Ferrario, Roberta (et al.)
Legal Multimedia Ontologies and Semantic Annotation for Search and Retrieval - pages 259-271 - González-Conejero, Jorge
Law, Governance and Technology Series 1
Springer, Hardback, 279 pages
