Relational justice: mediation and ODR through the World Wide Web

ODR means "Online Dispute Resolution". Dialogue, negotiation and mediation are coming back as sources of contemporary law. We introduce in this paper two concepts and two related projects. We define the concepts of "relational law" and "relational justice". And, at the same time, we describe how to put them in place from a social and technological point of view. Therefore, we introduce two concrete applications: (i) the Catalan White Book on Mediation, a large project to assemble the required social and legal knowledge to draft a general statute on mediation (Catalan Government); (ii) the Ontomedia Project, a semantically-driven platform allowing end-users to negotiate and mediate their conflicts in several domains (family, commerce, environment, health care, administration…). The paper describes the state of the art of ODR services, and proposes some strategies for legal electronic institutions. A middle-out theoretical approach and a mediation core-ontology are briefly described. We situate these two projects within the next generation of Semantic Web services, and the so-called Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 developments

Modeling expert knowledge in the mediation domain: a middle-out approach to design ODR ontologies

In this paper we describe the steps taken to model expert knowledge within the mediation domain as the basis for the design of the Mediation Core Ontology (MCO), of which we also offer a first outline of its present stage of development. MCO is created from scratch by eliciting practical knowledge from mediation experts to identify the basic working concepts of the domain. MCO offers initial support towards knowledge acquisition and reasoning and, in later steps, will serve as a general basis for the development of different mediation domain and sub-domain ontologies to be used by the ONTOMEDIA mediation platform, currently also under development

ODR, ontologies, and web 2.0

Online communities and institutions create new spaces for interaction, but also open new avenues for the emergence of grievances, claims, and disputes. Consequently, online dispute resolution (ODR) procedures are core to these new online worlds. But can ODR mechanisms provide sufficient levels of reputation, trust, and enforceability for it to become mainstream? This contribution introduces the new approaches to ODR and provides a description of the design and structure of Ontomedia, a web-based platform to facilitate online mediation in different domain

Complaint Ontology Pattern - COP

In this paper we present an ontology design pattern to conceptualize complaints - an important domain still uncovered by ODPs. The proposed Complaint Ontology Pattern (COP) has been designed based on the analysis of free text complaints from available complaint datasets (banking, air transport, automobile) among other knowledge sources. We present a detailed use case from consumer disputes. We evaluate the pattern by annotating the complaints from our use case and by discussing how COP aligns to existing ontologies

Legal crowdsourcing and relational law : what the semantic web can do for legal education

Crowdsourcing and Relational Law are interrelated concepts that can be successfully applied to the legal domain and, more specifically, to the field of legal education. 'Crowdsourcing' means 'participation of people (crowds)' and refers theoretically to the aggregated production of a common knowledge in a global data space. 'Relational law' refers to the regulatory link between Web 2.0 and 3.0, based on trust and dialogue, which emerges from the intertwining of top-down existing legal systems and bottom-up participation (the Web of People). Legal education today has a major role to play in the broad space opened up in terms of future potential of the Semantic Web. The following paper places a lens on the educational value of crowdsourcing and the relational approach to governance and law

Singling out Legal Knowledge from World Knowledge. An NLP-based Approach

1. Introduction - 2. Background and Motivation - 3. The Term Extraction Approach - 4. Experiments and Results - 5. Evaluation - 5.1. General Evaluation Criteria - 5.2. Discussion of Results - 6. Conclusio

The flood, the channels, and the dykes : managing legal information a globalized and digital world

Information search and retrieval are part of daily routines of the legal profession. Lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and legal clerks usually access a number of electronic resources to browse, search, select, or update legal contents. Legal databases have currently become large digital libraries where the tasks related to information-seeking may sometimes be cumbersome. Adding semantics to support information search may provide significant results in terms of efficiency, efficacy, and user satisfaction. Semantic technologies may be able to improve legal information search in the judicial and lawyers' domains. However, legal professionals sometimes prefer following routines than changing their information search behavior. New trends in legal ontologies and Semantic Web technologies may help to improve both professional and laymen's skills

A legal system to modify autonomous vehicle designs in transnational contexts

Autonomous vehicles, one of the signature technologies of the rapid development of artificial intelligence, have brought about a rapid change in the relevant legal norms and legal mandates. This change makes it more challenging for manufacturers and designers of autonomous vehicles to ensure the legal compliance of their product designs in a more dynamic way. Therefore, rather than approaching the issue from the perspective of judges or the cars themselves, we propose a legal reasoning system applicable to the adjustment of autonomous vehicle design options from the designer’s perspective, building on a series of previous studies. Focusing on the circulation of autonomous vehicles between different countries, the system attempts to help designers accomplish the adjustment of design solutions between different legal systems instead of designing new prototypes

Los modelos de semántica de marcos para la representación del conocimiento jurídico en el Derecho Comparado: el caso de la responsabilidad del Estado

En aquest article s'analitza en profunditat i es realitza una proposta de representació del coneixement jurídic subjacent al concepte de responsabilitat de l'Estat des d'una perspectiva multilingüe i juscomparativa. Per a això, es proposa d'augmentar la informació dels marcs semàntics (a partir d'ara, marcs) a través dels semantic types en el sistema FrameNet, amb el doble objectiu de servir com a representació interlingua del coneixement jurídic i de formalitzar les causes del desajust lèxic i conceptual dels sistemes jurídics. S'estudia el principi de responsabilitat de l'Estat en els models espanyol, anglès, francès i italià i es demostra com una descripció més detallada del coneixement jurídic, a través de la vinculació dels frame elements (a partir d'ara designats amb l'acrònim FE) dels marcs amb els tipus semàntics [±sentient], possibilita no només la utilització d'aquests com a representació interlingua, sinó, a més, procura explicar les divergències/convergències dels diferents plantejaments del concepte de responsabilitat de l'Estat, ancorats en contextos socioculturals de diferent tradició. La present proposta evidencia els avantatges de l'esmentada formalització com a model explicatiu del procés dinàmic de vaig donar/convergència en la jurisprudència del Tribunal de Justícia de la Unió Europea (a partir d'ara designat amb la sigla TJUE).This article offers an in-depth analysis, and proposes a representation of the legal knowledge underlying the concept of State responsibility from a multilingual and comparative law perspective. To this end, it recommends increasing information on frame semantics (hereinafter, frames) through the semantic types in the FrameNet system, with the double purpose of acting as an interlingual representation of legal knowledge and formalising the causes for lexical and conceptual imbalances in legal systems. The article studies the principle of State responsibility in the Spanish, English, French and Italian models and shows how a more detailed description of legal knowledge through the linking of the frame elements (hereinafter designed by the acronym FE) of the frames with the semantic types [±sentient], makes it feasible not just to use these as an interlingual representation, but also to try to explain the divergences/convergences of the various approaches to the concept of the State responsibility that are rooted in sociocultural contexts of a different tradition. This proposal demonstrates the advantages of this formalisation as a model to explain the dynamic process of divergence/convergence in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (referred to hereinafter by the acronym CJEU).En este artículo se analiza en profundidad y se realiza una propuesta de representación del conocimiento jurídico subyacente al concepto de responsabilidad del Estado desde una perspectiva multilingüe y juscomparativa. Para ello, se propone aumentar la información de los marcos semánticos (a partir de ahora, marcos) a través de los semantic types en el sistema FrameNet, con el doble objetivo de servir como representación interlingüe del conocimiento jurídico y de formalizar las causas del desajuste léxico y conceptual de los sistemas jurídicos. Se estudia el principio de responsabilidad del Estado en los modelos español, inglés, francés e italiano y se demuestra cómo una descripción más detallada del conocimiento jurídico, a través de la vinculación de los frame elements (a partir de ahora designados con el acrónimo FE) de los marcos con los tipos semánticos [±sentient], posibilita no solo la utilización de estos como representación interlingüe, sino, además, procura explicar las divergencias/convergencias de los distintos planteamientos del concepto de responsabilidad del Estado, anclados en contextos socioculturales de diferente tradición. La presente propuesta evidencia las ventajas de dicha formalización como modelo explicativo del proceso dinámico de di/convergencia en la jurisprudencia del Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea (a partir de ahora designado con la sigla TJUE)