Ontology Mapping for a Legal Question Answering System

Legal information retrieval systems, such question answering, use legal ontologies to represent semantic objects, to associate them with legal documents and to make inferences about them. The ontology mapping process can help users to reuse and compare information from different ontologies. In this paper we present a review on legal ontologies and present an approach to ontology mapping based on argumentation. Individual mappings are computed by specialized agents using different mapping approaches. Next, these agents use argumentation to exchange their local results, in order to agree on the obtained mappings. To each argument is associated a strength, representing how confident an agent is in the similarity of two ontology terms. Based on their preferences and confidence of the arguments, the agents compute their preferred mapping sets. The arguments in such preferred sets are viewed as the set of globally acceptable arguments. This work is part of a question answering system for the legal domain

LawV : towards an ontology-based visual modeling language in the legal domain

There has been an increase use of Domain-Specific Visual Modeling Language (DSVML) as a means of improving models’ comprehensibility and, consequently, stakeholders’ productivity. Combining the benefits of DSVMLs and of an ontological approach for designing and evaluating DSVMLs, we present, in this paper, the first-steps towards an ontology-based DSVML in the legal domain called LawV. The main purpose of LawV is to provide for a visual symbolic representation for legal statements. LawV has been built by applying an ontology-based language engineering method called PoNTO-S and UFO-L, a legal core ontology. To evaluate LawV, we instantiate a judicial case selected from the database of Appeal Court of the Esp ́ırito Santo State in Brazil

IS standards in designing business-to-government collaborations.

IS STANDARDS IN DESIGNING BUSINESS-TO-GOVERNMENT COLLABORATIONS. Elaborating the impact of standards on inter-organizational collaborations, inter-organizational studies demonstrated a standard’s positive impact on the collaboration between governmental and business partners. How and under which conditions information systems (IS) standards contribute to the effectiveness of business-to-government (B2G) collaborations in customs management is the topic of this thesis. Chapter 2 provides the theoretical and methodological background of the thesis. It illustrates how standards research emerged under institutional conditions such as actor types, linkages and social structures. With the case study in Chapter 3, the thesis introduces a reference framework that gathers different aspects in three pre-selected international business-to-government collaborations. Describing the cases that are subject to the export from EU to non-EU countries a diagnosis of B2G collaborations and relevant elements for the design of the artifact is conducted. A diagnosis of related work in the field of B2G collaborations is provided in Chapter 4. The assessment of collaboration forms revealed necessary constructs of a procedure model and institutional steps necessary to form B2G collaboration as such. Chapter 5 distils related work of IS standards research. In Chapters 6 and 7 considerations from the previous chapters lead to the core part of the thesis, the design and build of a procedure model to institutionalize B2G collaborations, the B2G Procedure Model (B2GPM). The results from the first round of design, the building blocks for B2G collaborations, are subject to Chapter 6. They conclude in a set of design principles of the B2GPM that are being introduced in the chapter. Chapter 7 covers the second round of design by refining the elements of B2G collaboration and the design principles. It continues with the design of the B2GPM. The composition, description, and documentation of the procedure model are the core part of this chapter. Chapter 8 is dedicated to the question of required organizational adoption to deploy the B2GPM. The model is seen as a procedural innovation by which B2G collaboration in customs management can be further improved. The applicability of the B2GPM is based on a series of evaluation cycles and results in the provision of influencing factors of organizational adoption.

UFO-L: UMA ONTOLOGIA NÚCLEO DE ASPECTOS JURÍDICOS CONSTRUÍDA SOB A PERSPECTIVA DAS RELAÇÕES JURÍDICAS

Nas últimas décadas, o Direito tem se voltado para a Computação em busca de soluções para a representação do domínio jurídico, para o armazenamento de grandes volumes de informação e para a recuperação dessas informações com o intuito de gerar conhecimento para apoio a tomadas de decisões. Dentre as diversas soluções propostas para a representação do domínio jurídico, destacam-se as ontologias jurídicas, que propõem a representação de uma conceitualização compartilhada de conceitos jurídicos e suas relações. As ontologias jurídicas, que representam conceitos jurídicos genéricos passíveis de serem usados e reutilizados na construção de outras ontologias ou em linguagens de modelagem do domínio jurídico, são denominadas Legal Core Ontologies (LCOs) ou Ontologia Núcleo Jurídica. A abordagem da maioria das LCOs é a da representação do Direito focado nas normas jurídicas. No entanto, nesta pesquisa, optou-se por uma abordagem focada nas relações jurídicas para a investigação e para a construção de uma ontologia núcleo jurídica. Embora ambas as abordagens tragam benefícios, a vantagem dessa última é a possibilidade da explicitação de outros conceitos e relacionamentos que não ficam evidenciados na primeira. Em particular, o entendimento da relação jurídica como relação entre sujeitos que desempenham papéis jurídicos, com posições jurídicas inerentes a estes papéis, as quais estão dispostas de tal forma a influenciar os demais sujeitos/papéis jurídicos envolvidos. Neste contexto, o problema a ser atacado está na seara da lacuna entre Computação e Direito, ou seja, no problema de modelagem conceitual aplicada ao recorte da realidade jurídica e como ela é representada. A base teórica desta tese é composta por duas teorias: a Teoria dos Direitos Constitucionais de Robert Alexy e a Teoria dos Fundamentos Ontológicos para Modelos Conceituais Estruturais de Giancarlo Guizzardi. O resultado dessa investigação é um artefato denominado UFO-L e seu catálogo de padrões de modelagem, aplicado em análises ontológicas, na modelagem de domínios jurídicos e na construção de linguagens visuais de domínio jurídico

A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Comparing Legislation

In the E-POWER project relevant tax legislation and business processes are modelled in UML to improve the speed and efficiency with which the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration can implement decision support systems for internal use and for its clients. These conceptual models have also proven their usefulness for efficient and effective analysis of draft legislation. We are currently researching whether conceptual modeling can also be used to compare `similar' legislation from different jurisdictions. Better insight in the process of modeling and comparing legislation from different legislators is expected to improve the capacity of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration to react to future consequences of increased movement of people, products, and money between EU member states and increased harmonization between tax authorities in Europe. In addition, the discovery of the requirements of comparing models is also expected to result in a more principled, more robust, and language-independent methodology for modeling legislation. This paper discusses known problems and requirements of comparing legislation, and the expected results of comparing models of legislation