For more than a decade constructing ontologies for legal domains, we, at the Leibniz Center for Law, felt really the need to develop a core ontology for law that would enable us to re-use the common denominator of the various legal domains. In this paper we present two core ontologies for law. The first one was the result of a PhD thesis by [Valente, 1995], called FOLaw. FOLaw specifies functional dependencies between types of knowledge involved in legal reasoning. Despite the fact that FOLaw was the starting point for a number of ontologies and legal reasoning systems in various (European) projects, it is rather an epistemological framework than a (core) ontology. We are not the only ones who easily confound epistemology with ontology. In the paper we present some examples and discuss whether this epistemological promiscuity in (core) ontology development is a serious problem. It is to some extent, as it limits the scope of re-use (if not leading to confusion). Therefore, we started about four years ago the development of a `real' core-ontology for law based upon notions of common sense. The reason for a common-sense foundation is that domain independent concepts of law -- the common denominator -- are still tainted with a strong common-sense flavor. Moreover, domains of law refer to social activities which are generally governed by common-sense notions. This core ontology, called LRI-Core, consists of five major portions (`worlds'): physical, mental and abstract classes; roles and occurrences.

Abstract. In this paper we describe a legal core ontology that is part of a generic architecture for legal knowledge systems, which will enable the interchange of knowledge between existing legal knowledge systems. This Legal Knowledge Interchange Format, is under development in the Estrella project and has two main roles: 1) the translation of legal knowledge bases written in different representation formats and formalisms and 2) a knowledge representation formalism that is part of a larger architecture for developing legal knowledge systems. A legal (core) ontology can play an important role in the translation of existing legal knowledge bases to other representation formats, in particular into LKIF as the basis for articulate knowledge serving. We describe the methodology underlying the LKIF core ontology, introduce the concepts it defines, and discuss its use in the formalisation of an EU directive.

Abstract. In this paper we present LRI-Core, a core ontology for covering domains of law. After a decade of developing many ontologies for legal domains and applications, the need for a unifying core ontology that covers the main concepts that are common to all legal domains became very apparent. It can be argued that not only these domains have a predominant common-sense character – the law is still for the people – but also that typical legal concepts such as norm, role responsibility, contract, etc. have still a grounding in abstract common-sense conceptualizations. This common sense grounding is lacking in various upper- or foundational ontologies developed thus far. The paper presents a number of design principles that follow from the common-sense stance in developing the LRI-Core: the most important being cognitive plausibility. From this perspective, knowledge about the physical world, with the central notions of object and process is taken as a basis for metaphorizing mental and abstract worlds. The intentional stance that differentiates the physical world from the mental world is also the basis for the creation of a behavioural world of roles. In summary, LRI-Core

Work performed partly while visiting LADSEB-CNR; Corso Stati Uniti, 4; Padova, Italia, Information systems ontology is intended to facilitate interoperability among the many applications which are now becoming available on the Internet. In particular, it is intended to facilitate the development of intelligent agents which can automate a large part of the task of a user achieving some end employing multiple autonomous applications. A large number of ontologies exist supporting specific kinds of interoperation among selected, generally mutually description of what there is in the world, in an application-independent form, which can be used both to help build specific ontologies and to help in finding common ground among them. This paper argues that for the purposes of information systems interoperation and the semantic web there is a distinction in upper ontologies between formal and material ontologies, based on analogies with concepts in Kant’s synthetic a priori, and that formal ontologies whose focus is on how we see the world are more likely to be successfully developed in the absence of applications than are material ontologies, which attempt to catalog the world a priori. 2

Abstract. Ontologies are a way to express semantics of concepts in a formal way. IPROnto is an ontology of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) domain. It has been specified to facilitate the development of e-commerce applications that need to be aware of rights associated to specific multimedia content. The paper describes the ontology and its possible uses. Since we started this work in the context of MPEG-21 standardisation, we are currently progressing in the development of applications that follow the DRM MPEG-21 standards, such as a REL (Rights Expression Language) and a RDD (Rights Data Dictionary), and aligning our ontology to those specifications. 1 1.

Abstract. Legal web information retrieval systems need the capability to reason with the knowledge modeled by legal ontologies. Using this knowledge it is possible to represent and to make inferences about the semantic content of legal documents. In this paper a methodology for applying NLP techniques to automatically create a legal ontology is proposed. The ontology is defined in the OWL semantic web language and it is used in a logic programming framework, EVOLP+ISCO, to allow users to query the semantic content of the documents. ISCO allows an easy and efficient integration of declarative, object-oriented and constraint-based programming techniques with the capability to create connections with external databases. EVOLP is a dynamic logic programming framework allowing the definition of rules for actions and events. An application of the proposed methodology to the legal information retrieval system of the Portuguese Attorney General’s Office is described. 1

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In the legal domain, ontologies enjoy quite some reputation as a way to model normative knowledge about laws and jurisprudence. Several methods have been used and are well-known qua ontological methods. However, no previous attempt to construct ontologies based on professional knowledge exists, capturing judicial practical expertise. This paper shows the preliminary ontology development for the second version of the prototype Iuriservice, a web based intelligent FAQ for judicial use, containing a repository of professional judicial knowledge. The iFAQ system will focus on such knowledge and will base on OPLK —Ontology of Professional Legal Knowledge — developed by UAB. Profesional Legal Knowledge refers to the core of professional work that contains the experience of the daily treatment of cases and is unevenly distributed within individuals as a result of their professional and personal experiences. The knowledge acquisition process has been based on an ethnographic process designed by the UAB team and the Spanish School of the Judiciary within the national SEC project, to efficiently obtain useful and representative information from questionnaire-based interviews. Nearly 800 competency questions have been extracted from these interviews and the ontology is being modelled from the selection of relevant terms. Regarding ontology modelling issues, we have followed the DILIGENT argumentation methodology to control the discussion and trace the arguments used in favor or against the introduction of a concept X as part of the domain ontology. This paper presents the preliminary Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) that has been extracted manually from the selection of relevant terms from nearly 200 competency questions and affirms that the modelling of this professional judicial knowledge demands the description of this knowledge as it is perceived by the judge and the abandonment of dogmatic legal categorizations. 1.

In the legal domain, ontologies enjoy quite some reputation as a way to model normative knowledge about laws and jurisprudence. While there is a multitude of ontological models to represent theoretical legal knowledge, no previous attempt to construct ontologies based on professional knowledge exists, capturing judicial expertise. We define the epistemological and ontological levels as separate issues.

In a common law system, which is currently prevailing in countries like India, England, and USA, decisions made by judges are important sources of application and interpretation of law. The increasing availability of legal judgments in digital form