Authors:
Leisheng Peng
1
;
Duminda Wijesekera
1
;
Thomas C. Wingfield
2
and
James B. Michael
3
Affiliations:
1
George Mason University, United States
;
2
The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, United States
;
3
Naval Postgraduate School, United States
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agent-Oriented Programming
;
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
;
Biomedical Engineering
;
Case-Based Reasoning
;
Data Engineering
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Information Systems
;
Information Engineering Methodologies
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Intelligent Agents
;
Internet Technology
;
Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
;
Knowledge Management
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Modeling of Distributed Systems
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Ontology Engineering
;
Pattern Recognition
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Software Engineering
;
Symbolic Systems
;
Theory and Methods
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
Today’s cyber attacks come from many Internet and legal domains, requiring a coordinated swift and legitimate response. Consequently, determining the legality of a response requires a coordinated consensual legal argument that weaves legal sub-arguments from all participating domains. Doing so as a precursor for forensic analysis is to provide legitimacy to the process. We describe a tool that can be used to weave such a legal argument using the WWW securely.
Our tool is a legal whiteboard that allows participating group of attorneys to meet in Cyberspace in real time and construct a legal argument graphically by using a decision tree. A tree constructed this way and verified to hold anticipated legal challenges can then be used to guide forensic experts and law enforcement personnel during their active responses and off-line examinations.
In our tool the group of attorneys that construct the legal argument elects a leader (say the super builder) that permits (through access contro
l) the group to construct a decision tree that, when populated by actual parameters of a cyber incident will output a decision. During the course of the construction, all participating attorneys can construct sub-parts of the arguments that can be substantiated with relevant legal documents from their own legal domains. Because diverse legal domains use different nomenclatures, we provide the capability to index and search legal documents using a complex International legal Ontology that goes beyond the traditional NeuxsLexus like legal databases. This Ontology itself can be created using the tool from remote locations. Once the sub arguments are made, they are submitted to the master builder through a ticketing mechanism that has the final authority to approve and synchronize the sub-trees
to become the final decision tree with all its attached legal documents. Our tool has been fine tuned with numerous interviews with practicing attorneys in the subject area of cyber crime.
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