A Systematic Literature Review of Legal Ontologies

This article analyzes the publications concerning the topic of legal ontology as supporting processes and activities of legal nature. A systematic review of the theme and the identification of the main existing studies are carried out. This review is developed throughout three tasks: contextualization of the theme from a legal perspective; systematic literature search; analysis and synthesis of the information obtained. From these studies the present work serves as a basis for the understanding and discussion of the possibilities of applying legal ontologies to support the activities of the legislative process in the parliamentary scope, and also the judicial process. Furthermore, it is intended in the future the definition of a legal domain-specific language. This article also presents the mapping of the publications of this theme with the existing studies and presents the respective critical and comparative analysis

Open Government Data Licensing Framework: An Informal Ontology for Supporting Mashup

Objectives of the thesis are –1) to identify the legal problems coming from mashups of Open Govern-ment Data (OGD) and 2) to purpose an informal ontology to help technical reusers of Public Sector Informa-tion to utilize datasets according to their intended purpose and in compliance with the legal obligations that govern the rights to reuse the data. A survey of national OGD portals found that the majority of OGD are released under inappropriate li-censes, not fully complying with the legal rules that apply to the reuse of the data. Open Government Data can be released and covered by multiple licensing regimes, up to 33 in a single country. We have analysed the European Union (EU) legal framework of reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI), the EU Database Directive and copyright framework and other legal sources (e.g., licenses, legal notices, and terms of use) that can apply to open government Datasets. From this deep analysis we have modelled several major concepts in an Informal Ontology of Open Government Data Licenses Framework for a Mash-up Model (iOGDL4M). The iOGDL4M will be used for qualifying datasets in order to improve the accuracy of their legal anno-tation. The iOGDL4M also aims to connect each applicable legal rule to official legal texts in order to direct legal experts and reusers to primary sources. This research aims to present 1) a legal analysis of OGD regulation in the European Union and its mem-ber states; 2) the Survey of National Open Government Data Portals and analysis of the most commonly applied licenses and legal notices and their compatibility; and 3) the Informal Ontology of Open Govern-ment Data Licenses Framework for a Mash-up Model. This thesis is comprised of 4 publications. It consists of presentation of the research, the publications, and annexes that support the research

Open Government Data Licensing Framework: An Informal Ontology for Supporting Mashup

Objectives of the thesis are –1) to identify the legal problems coming from mashups of Open Government Data (OGD) and 2) to purpose an informal ontology to help technical reusers of Public Sector Information to utilize datasets according to their intended purpose and in compliance with the legal obligations that govern the rights to reuse the data. A survey of national OGD portals found that the majority of OGD are released under inappropriate licenses, not fully complying with the legal rules that apply to the reuse of the data. Open Government Data can be released and covered by multiple licensing regimes, up to 33 in a single country. We have analysed the European Union (EU) legal framework of reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI), the EU Database Directive and copyright framework and other legal sources (e.g., licenses, legal notices, and terms of use) that can apply to open government Datasets. From this deep analysis we have modelled several major concepts in an Informal Ontology of Open Government Data Licenses Framework for a Mash-up Model (iOGDL4M). The iOGDL4M will be used for qualifying datasets in order to improve the accuracy of their legal annotation. The iOGDL4M also aims to connect each applicable legal rule to official legal texts in order to direct legal experts and reusers to primary sources

Dynamic Aspects of OPJK Legal Ontology

The OPJK (Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge) is a legal ontology developed to map questions of junior judges to a set of stored frequently asked questions. In this paper, we investigate dynamic and temporal aspects of one of the SEKT legal ontologies, by subjecting the ontology OPJK to MORE, a multi-version ontologies reasoning Sys-tem. MORE is based on a temporal logic approach. We show how the temporal logic approach can be used to obtain a better understanding of dynamic and temporal evolution of legal ontologies