The process of constructing ontological meaning based on criminal law verbs

This study intends to account for the process involved in the construction of the conceptual meaning of verbs (#EVENTS) directly related to legal aspects of terrorism and organized crime based on the evidence provided by the Globalcrimeterm Corpus and the consistent application of specific criteria for term extraction. The selected 49 concepts have eventually been integrated in the Core Ontology of FunGramKB (Functional Grammar Knowledge Base), a knowledge base which is founded on the principles of deep semantics and is also aimed at the computational development of the Lexical Constructional Model (www.fungramkb.com). To achieve this purpose, key phases of the COHERENT methodology (Periñán Pascual & Mairal Usón 2011) are followed, particularly those which involve the modelling, subsumption and hierarchisation of the aforementioned verbal concepts. The final outcome of this research shows that most of the apparently specialised conceptual units should eventually be included in the Core Ontology instead of the specific Globalcrimeterm Subontology, due to the fact that the semantic content of their corresponding lexical units can be found in widely used learner`s dictionaries and, consequently, this conceptual information is not only shared by the experts in the field but also by the layperson and the average speaker of the language

Legal Ontology for Nexus: Water, Energy and Food in EU Regulations

Objectives of the thesis are – (a) to identify the problems in water-energy-food nexus from ICT and Law point of view and to propose theoretically a legal knowledge framework for water-energy-food nexus in order to reduce those problems technologically, (b) to construct and implement legal ontology for nexus extracted from EU water, energy and food Regulations in OWL 2 language, which is a part of the grater work of implementing legal knowledge framework for water-energy-food nexus pro-posed through the compilation of objective (a). Considering these objectives, this thesis presents total five chapters. Chapter 1 is dedicated to fulfill the requirement of objective (a) and the rest chapters are devoted for objective (b). More particularly chapter four presents technical descriptions of the legal ontology for nexus, while chapter two and three articulate methodological aspect of it. Chapter five evaluates legal ontology for nexus. Additionally, besides the list of references, annex 1 delivers all asserted restrictions used in this ontology and annex 2 provides the links of all modules and documentations of legal ontology for nexus.Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate programme in “Law, Science and Technology

A cognitive science perspective on legal ontologies

We can trace five origins of ontology engineering, and all five still play a major role in ontology engineering. Each of these roots gives a different perspective on content and use of ontologies. Philosophical ontology is concerned with "reality"; Information science with systematic terminology; Artificial Intelligence (AI) with terminological knowledge, Knowledge Engineering with the specification of knowledge bases, and Information Management with semantics. Associated with these roots, the applications differ and range from analytic clarification to automated reasoning. Also mismatches between formalism and aim occur frequently. These mismatches can often be traced to an unclear distinction between knowledge and semantics. We explain this difference in Section 4.3 using a simple cognitive architecture for natural language production. A Cognitive Science perspective is however well suited where top ontologies try to cover the core concepts of common sense, as a wealth of empirical studies have become available on the content of our "knowledge instincts". We present an example on the modeling of spatial concepts and refer to our still ongoing work on a common-sense based core ontology for legal domains: LKIF-Core (Hoekstra et al. 2007; Hoekstra 2009)

Approaches to legal ontologies : theories, domains, methodologies

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).Foreword; Pompeu Casanovas, Giovanni Sartor.- Preface; Barry Smith.- 1 Introduction. Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engi-neering: Experiences and Future Directions; Pompeu Casanovas, Giovanni Sartor, Maria Angela Biasiotti, Meritxell Fernández-Barrera.- 2 The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies; Meritxell Fernández-Barrera, Giovanni Sartor.- 3 Empirically Grounded Development of Legal Ontologies: a Socio-Legal Perspective; Pompeu Casanovas, Núria Casellas, Joan-Josep Vallbé.- 4 A Cognitive Science Perspective on Legal Ontologies; Joost Breuker, Rinke Hoekstra.- 5 Social Ontology and Documentality; Maurizio Ferraris.- 6 The Case-Based Reasoning Approach: Ontologies for Analogical Legal Argument; Kevin D. Ashley.- 7 A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, In-formation and Networks; Pierre Mazzega, Danièle Bourcier, Paul Bourgine, Nadia Nadah, Romain Boulet.- 8 The Multi-layered Legal Information Perspective; Guido Boella, Piercarlo Rossi.- 9 Legal Ontologies: the Linguistic Perspective; Maria Angela Biasiotti, Daniela Tiscornia.- 10 A Legal Document Ontology: the Missing Layer in Legal Docu-ment Modelling; Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone, Fabio Vitali.- 11 From Thesaurus towards Ontologies in Large Legal Databases; Ángel Sancho Ferrer, Carlos Fernández Hernández, José Manuel Mateo Rivero.- 12 The Computational Ontology Perspective: Design Patterns for Web Ontologies; Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti, Eva Blomqvist.- 13 A Learning Approach for Knowledge Acquisition in the Legal Domain; Enrico Francesconi.- 14 Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: the Legal Perspective; Roberta Ferrario, Nicola Guarino, Meritxell Fernández-Barrera.- 15 Legal Multimedia Ontologies and Semantic Annotation for Search and Retrieval; Jorge González-Conejero.- Index