Supporting public decision making in policy deliberations: An ontological approach

This is the post-print version of the Paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 SpringerSupporting public decision making in policy deliberations has been a key objective of eParticipation which is an emerging area of eGovernment. EParticipation aims to enhance citizen involvement in public governance activities through the use of information and communication technologies. An innovative approach towards this objective is exploiting the potentials of semantic web technologies centred on conceptual knowledge models in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are generally defined as explicit human and computer shared views on the world of particular domains. In this paper, the potentials and benefits of using ontologies for policy deliberation processes are discussed. Previous work is then extended and synthesised to develop a deliberation ontology. The ontology aims to define the necessary semantics in order to structure and interrelate the stages and various activities of deliberation processes with legal information, participant stakeholders and their associated arguments. The practical implications of the proposed framework are illustrated.This work is funded by the European Commission under the 2006/1 eParticipation call

Requirements for enrichment tools

This report gives a high level overview of requirements for Enrichment tools in the Openlaws.eu project. Openlaws.eu aims to initiate a platform and develop a vision for Big Open Legal Data (BOLD): an open framework for legislation, case law, and legal literature from across Europe

A Methodology for Ontology-based Knowledge-level Inoperability among Parliaments

Most of the information systems (IS) interoperability research and practice in the e-government area has been focused on the operational level, aiming mainly at enabling the delivery of integrated electronic services involving several government agencies to citizens and enterprises based on the ‘one-stop shop’ model, and the support of co-operation among government agencies from the same or even different countries at the operational level. This paper is dealing with knowledge-level interoperability, which aims at the support of higher knowledge-intensive tasks of government, such as the formulation of legislation. In particular, it presents an ontology-based methodology for achieving knowledge-level interoperability among IS of Parliaments. It is based on the common use by Parliaments of the ontology of the ‘Issue-Based Information Systems’ (IBIS) framework for codifying the public policy related knowledge produced in the various stages of legislation formulation. Also, an application of the proposed methodology is presented for the case of the Law concerning ‘Contracts of Voluntary Cohabitation’ that has been recently passed by the Greek Parliament; its evaluation resulted in a proposal for a refinement of the above ontology that can be used for achieving a better codification of the knowledge that the main content (articles) of Laws contains

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

Sharing e-Health information through ontological layering

e-Health information, including patient clinical and demographic data, is very often dispersed across various environments, which either generate them or retrieve them from different sources. Healthcare professionals often need related e-health information in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of a patient's health status. There are many obstacles to retrieving information and data from heterogeneous sources. In this paper we show that our ontological layering helps in (a) classifying requests imposed by healthcare professionals when retrieving e-health information from heterogeneous sources and (b) resolving semantic heterogeneities across repositories and composing an adequate answer to issued requests. We use a layered software architectural model based on Generic ontology for Context-aware, Interoperable and Data sharing (Go- CID) software applications, applicable to e-Health environments. Ontological layering and reasoning have been demonstrated with semantic web technologies

Metalex XML and the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format

Electronic government invariably involves XML and electronic law: legislation is as essential to public administration as the ball is to a ball game. This paper gives an overview of two XML standard proposals dealing with two complementary aspects of electronic legislation \u2013 the documents themselves as a carrier, and an institutional reality they represent \u2013 in a coherent way: MetaLex XML and the Legal Knowledge Interchange format (LKIF). MetaLex XML is well on its way to becoming formal and de facto standard for legislation in XML. LKIF is yet to be submitted as a proposed standard. LKIF includes some interesting innovations from an AI & Law perspective