UFO-L: A Core Ontology of Legal Concepts Built from a Legal Relations Perspective

Cristine Leonor Griffo

2015

Abstract

Computer and Law is a transdisciplinary research field, which has received increasing attention from researchers in the past twenty-five years. The problem of presenting the legal domain has been investigated in different perspectives by researchers. One of them is the ontological perspective. Specifically, there are some kind of ontologies called legal core ontologies (LCO), which represent generic legal concepts (e.g. legal norm, legal fact, and legal relation), usable in different legal domains. Despite the efforts of researchers in the search for a computational solution that satisfactorily represent the legal domain, frequently researches have not taken into account the use of legal theories, resulting in a gap between the conceptualizations that are typically considered in the areas of Computer Science and the study of the Law. In this Ph.D. proposal, we defend the use of two pillars: legal theories and foundational ontologies. In addition, we defend, that the choice of a legal theory must take into account the needs of the contemporary juridical world. In this sense, the choice of a legal theory that does not take account the importance of principles as legal norms will result in a non-flexible computing solution, distant from the juridical reality. For this reason, we have chosen Alexy’s Theory of Fundamental Rights (Alexy, 2010). We propose removing the focus of legal norms and put it in legal relations (subjectivist view). As a result, we expect to achieve a legal core ontology that comes closer honor the current practice in the area of Law. Under the computational perspective, the construction of the LCO proposed here is based on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and propose a new layer for UFO. This layer (called UFO-L) will represent the generic legal concepts extracted from selected legal theories. In short, this research aims to answer the following questions: Is the use of ontologies effective to represent the contemporary legal world from the legal relations perspective? What benefits does the LCO provide for modeling legal domains?

References

  1. Alexy, R., 2010. A Theory of Constitutional Rights, Oxford University Press.
  2. Alexy, R., 2003. Constitutional Rights, Balancing, and Rationality. Ratio Juris, 16(2), pp.131-140.
  3. Athan, T. et al., 2013. OASIS LegalRuleML. In ICAIL 7813. ACM Press, p. 3.
  4. Bench-Capon, T., Araszkiewicz, M., Ashley, K., Atkinson, K., Bex, F., Borges, F., Wyner, A.Z., 2012. A history of AI and Law in 50 papers: 25 years of the international conference on AI and Law. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 20(3), pp.215-319.
  5. Breuker, J. & Hoekstra, R., 2004. Epistemology and ontology in core ontologies: FOLaw and LRI-Core, two core ontologies for law. In Proceedings of the EKAW*04 Workshop on Core Ontologies in Ontology Engineering.
  6. Breuker, J., Muntjewerff, A. & Bredewej, B., 1999. Ontological modelling for design educational systems. In Proceedings of the AI-ED 99 Workshop on Ontologies for Educational Systems.
  7. Caralt, N. C., 2008. Modelling Legal Knowledge through Ontologies. OPJK: the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
  8. Casanovas, P., 2012. A Note on Validity in Law and Regulatory Systems. Quaderns de filosofia i ciència, 42(2011), pp.29-40.
  9. Casellas, N. U., 2011. Legal Ontology Engineering.
  10. Ceci, M., 2013. Interpreting Judgements Using Knowledge Representation Methods And Computational Models of Argument. Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna.
  11. Distinto, I., D'Aquin, M. & Motta, E., 2014. LOTED2?: an Ontology of European Public Procurement Notices. In Semant. Web Interoper. Usability Appl.
  12. Gangemi, A., 2007. Design patterns for legal ontology construction. In LOAIT. pp. 65-85.
  13. Gordon, T. F., 2005. Artificial Intelligence and Legal Theory at Law Schools. Artificial Intelligence and Legal Education, pp.53-58.
  14. Gostojic, S. & Milosavljevic, B., 2013. Ontological Model of Legal Norms for Creating and Using Legal Acts. The IPSI BgD Transactions on Internet Research, 9(1), pp.19-25.
  15. Griffo, C., Almeida, J. P. A. & Guizzardi, G., 2015a. A Systematic Mapping of the Literature on Legal Core Ontologies. In Brazilian Conference on Ontologies, Ontobras.
  16. Griffo, C., Almeida, J. P. A. & Guizzardi, G., 2015b. Towards a Legal Core Ontology based on Alexy 78 s Theory of Fundamental Rights. In Multilingual Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Law, ICAIL 2015.
  17. Gruber, T., 1995. Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 43(5-6), pp.907-928.
  18. Guarino, N., 1998. Formal Ontology in Information Systems. In Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS). Trento, Italy: IOS Press, pp. 3-15.
  19. Guarino, N. & Guizzardi, G., 2015. “ We need to discuss the Relationship ”: Revisiting Relationships as Modeling Constructs. In 27th International Conference, CAiSE 2015 Proceedings. Sweden: Springer International Publishing, pp. 279-294.
  20. Guizzardi, G., 2005. Ontological Foundations for Structural Conceptual Model, Veenendaal, The Netherlands: Universal Press.
  21. Guizzardi, G., Falbo, R. & Guizzardi, R.S.S., 2008. Grounding Software Domain Ontologies in the Unified Foundational Ontology ( UFO ): The case of the ODE Software Process Ontology. In CIbSE. pp. 127-140.
  22. Hafner, C. D., 1980. Representation of knowledge in a legal information retrieval system. In Proceedings of the 3rd annual ACM conference on Research and development in information retrieval. pp. 139-153.
  23. Hage, J. & Verheij, B., 1999. The law as a dynamic interconnected system of states of affairs?: a legal top ontology -. Int. J. Human-Computer Studies, 51, pp.1043-1077.
  24. Hoekstra, R. et al., 2009. LKIF core: Principled ontology development for the legal domain. In Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications. pp. 21-52.
  25. Hoekstra, R. et al., 2007. The LKIF core ontology of basic legal concepts. In CEUR Workshop Proceedings. pp. 43-63.
  26. Hohfeld, W. N., 1917. Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning. Faculty Scholarship Series, Paper 4378.
  27. Hohfeld, W. N., 1913. Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions. The Yale Law Journal, 23(1), pp.16-59.
  28. Kececi, N. & Abran, A., 2001. An integrated measure for functional requirements correctness. IWSM2001, 11th.
  29. Kitchenham, B. & Charters, S., 2007. Guidelines for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering. Engineering, 2, p.1051.
  30. Kralingen, R. Van, 1997. A Conceptual Frame-based Ontology for the Law. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Legal Ontologies. pp. 6- 17.
  31. Kuhn, W., Kauppinen, T. & Janowicz, K., 2014. Linked Data - A Paradigm Shift for Geographic Information Science. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8728, pp.173-186.
  32. Masolo, C., Borgo, S., Gangemi, A., Guarino, N., Oltramari, A., 2003. IST Project 2001-33052 WonderWeb Deliverable D18. Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web,
  33. McCarty, L. T., 1989. A language for legal Discourse I. basic features. In Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Artificial intelligence and law.
  34. McCarty, L. T., 2002. Ownership: A case study in the representation of legal concepts. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 10(1-3), pp.135-161.
  35. McClure, J., 2007. The legal-RDF ontology. A generic model for legal documents. In LOAIT 2007 Workshop Proceedings. pp. 25-42.
  36. Mogalakwe, M., 2006. The Use of Documentary Research Methods. African Sociological Review, (1), pp.221- 230.
  37. Mommers, L., 1999. Knowing the law. Legal Information Systems as a Source of Knowledge Kluwer, ed.,
  38. Nardi, J.C. et al., 2013. Towards a commitment-based reference ontology for services. Proceedings - IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop, EDOC, pp.175-184.
  39. Oberle, D., 2006. Semantic Management of Middleware, Vol. 1. Springer Science & Business Media.
  40. Petersen, K. et al., 2008. Systematic mapping studies in software engineering. EASE'08 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, pp.68-77.
  41. Schneider, L. N., 2001. Naive Metaphysics, London.
  42. Shaheed, Jaspreet, Alexander Yip, and J. C., 2005. A TopLevel Language-Biased Legal Ontology. In ICAIL Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques (LOAIT).
  43. Staab, S. et al., 2001. Knowledge processes and ontologies. IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their Applications, 16(1), pp.26-34.
  44. Stamper, R. K., 1977. The LEGOL 1 prototype system and language. The Computer Journal, 20(2), pp.102-108.
  45. Stamper, R. K., 1991. The Role of Semantics in Legal Expert Systems and Legal Reasoning. Ratio Juris, 4(2), pp. 219-244.
  46. Uschold, M. & Gruninger, M., 1996. Ontologies: Principles, methods and applications. Knowledge Engineering Review, 11, pp.93-136.
  47. Uschold, M. & King, M., 1995. Towards a methodology for buiding ontologies. IJCAI-95 Wokshop on Basic Ontological Issues in KNowledge Sharing.
  48. Valente, A., 1995. Legal Knowledge Engineering; A Modelling Approach, Amsterdam: IOS Press.
  49. Valente, A. & Breuker, J., 1994. Ontologies: the Missing Link Between Legal Theory and AI & Law. In Legal knowledge based systems JURIX 94: The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Systems. pp. 138-149.
  50. Valente, A. & Breuker, J., 1996. Towards Principled Core Ontologies. In Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Systems.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Griffo C. (2015). UFO-L: A Core Ontology of Legal Concepts Built from a Legal Relations Perspective . In Doctoral Consortium - DC3K, (IC3K 2015) ISBN , pages 13-20. DOI: 10.5220/0005647700130020


in Bibtex Style

@conference{dc3k15,
author={Cristine Leonor Griffo},
title={UFO-L: A Core Ontology of Legal Concepts Built from a Legal Relations Perspective},
booktitle={Doctoral Consortium - DC3K, (IC3K 2015)},
year={2015},
pages={13-20},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005647700130020},
isbn={},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Doctoral Consortium - DC3K, (IC3K 2015)
TI - UFO-L: A Core Ontology of Legal Concepts Built from a Legal Relations Perspective
SN -
AU - Griffo C.
PY - 2015
SP - 13
EP - 20
DO - 10.5220/0005647700130020