Nomothesi@ api - reengineering the electronic platform

Ο στόχος αυτής της εργασίας, είναι να συμβάλει στον τομέα της αναπαράστασης νομικής γνώσης και στην ενσωμάτωση αυτής στην περιοχή των ανοιχτών δεδομένων στην Ελλάδα, τόσο από τεχνολογική σκοπιά, όσο και από άποψη διαφάνειας. Η Νομοθεσί@, είναι μια πλατφόρμα που σκοπό έχει να δώσει πρόσβαση στην ελληνική νομοθεσία, με τη χρήση ενός νομικού XML/RDF προτύπου και με διασυνδεδεμένα δεδομένα (linked data). Αυτή η νέα έκδοση της Νομοθεσίας προτείνει την αντικατάσταση του προηγούμενου προτύπου XML για τα ελληνικά νομικά έγγραφα για ένα νέο RDF, μια νέα Spring MVC αρχιτεκτονική και την παροχή πολλών REST υπηρεσιών όπως αυτή ενός SPARQL Endpoint. Η σύνδεση δεδομένων αφορά τη διασύνδεση και την ανοιχτή δημοσίευση ελληνικών δημόσιων δεδομένων και των νομοθετικών δεδομένων κατά μήκος της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης, με σκοπό την ενίσχυση της ηλεκτρονικής διακυβέρνησης. Πάνω σε αυτές τις αρχές, προσπαθήσαμε να επεκτείνουμετη Νομοθεσί@ με ένα ενοποιημένο RDF Σχήμα δεδομένων, προκειμένου να δημιουργηθεί ένα RESTful API για να αξιοποιήσει ολόκληρη την πολύτιμη σημασιολογική πληροφορία που έχει να προσφέρει η ελληνική νομοθεσία και να ενθαρρύνει περαιτέρω και πιο πολύπλοκα έργα που βασίζονται στον τομέα του διαδικτύου για την αναζήτηση και την περιήγηση της νομοθεσίας.The objective of this thesis is to contribute in legal knowledge’s representation and its integration in the area of Open Data in Greece, both from a technological perspective and in terms of transparency. Nomothesi@, is a platform to provide access to Greek Legislation, by means of a legal XML/RDF syntax and linked data. This new version of Nomethesi@ proposes the replacement of the previous XML standard for Greek legal documents to a new RDF one, a new Spring MVC architecture and many REST services such as a SPARQL Endpoint. Linking data is about interlinking and publishing openly Greek public data and legislative data across EU in order to enhance E-Government. On these fundamentals, we tried to expand Nomothesi@ with a unified RDF Schema, in order to create a RESTful API to serve all the precious semantic information Greek Legislation has to offer and to encourage further and more complex projects based on web services for searching and browsing legislation

Modeling and Preserving Greek Government Decisions using Semantic Web Technologies and Permissionless Blockchains

Σε αυτή τη διπλωματική εργασία παρουσιάζουμε έναν ανασχεδιασμό της Διαύγειας, του ελληνικού κυβερνητικού προγράμματος για ανοικτή και διαφανή δημόσια διακυβέρνηση. Μελετάμε τον τρόπο με τον οποίο οι αποφάσεις των δημόσιων φορέων μπορούν να μοντελοποιηθούν χρησιμοποιώντας OWL οντολογίες και εξετάζουμε τον τρόπο με τον οποίο μπορούν να τεθούν SPARQL ερωτήματα πάνω σε αυτές. Με τη χρήση του bitcoin blockchain, αναγκάζουμε τις κυβερνητικές αποφάσεις να παραμείνουν αμετάβλητες. Παρέχουμε μια υλοποίηση ανοικτού λογισμικού, με ονομασία DiavgeiaRedefined, η οποία επιτρέπει τη δημιουργία και την οπτικοποίηση των αποφάσεων σε περιηγητή διαδικτύου, προσφέρει ένα SPARQL τερματικό για τη δημιουργία ερωτημάτων και παρέχει στους πολίτες ένα αυτοματοποιημένο λογισμικό επαλήθευσης ορθότητας των αποφάσεων, ανιχνεύοντας πιθανές ατιμίες ενός κακόβουλου χρήστη. Τέλος, παραθέτουμε πειραματικά αποτέλεσματα, καταλήγοντας ότι οι μηχανισμοί που χρησιμοποιούμε είναι αποτελεσματικοί.We present a re-engineering of Diavgeia, the Greek government portal for open and transparent public administration. We study how decisions of Greek government institutions can be modeled using ontologies expressed in OWL and queried using SPARQL. We also discuss how to use the bitcoin blockchain, to enable government decisions to remain immutable. We provide an open source implementation, called DiavgeiaRedefined, that generates and visualizes the decisions inside a web browser, offers a SPARQL endpoint for retrieving and querying these decisions and provides citizens an automated tool for verifying correctness and detecting possible foul play by an adversary. We conclude with experimental results illustrating that our scheme is efficient and feasible

“Peri Nomou” System: Automated Codification and Interrelation of Legal Elements Based on Text Mining

One of the most promising developments comes with the use of innovative technologies and thus with the availability of novel services. The combination of text mining with legal elements may contribute to the development of many innovative legal information systems. Moreover, in the case of public admin-istrations and governments, the distribution, availability, and access towards legal information are es-sential and urgent. On the other hand, legal data and law texts are a potential open Government data category in order for innovation to be achieved, regarding the development of new, better, and more cost-effective services for citizens. Those data need to be available 24/7 basis and compliant towards a standard. Yet, there exist some severe issues at the moment regarding this access. This, in turn, makes the use of automated crawling and analysis more than difficult. This paper describes the “Peri Nomou” (about law) system: an innovative legal information system for Greek laws utilising text mining tech-niques to indexing legal documents, identifying correlations and dividing legal documents into their articles. The first version of the system has been evaluated by legal experts and the second version is developed based on the previous evaluation and presented in this paper. The results from the evaluation indicate the significance of the “Peri Nomou” system for the legal experts and allow us to promote the Peri Nomou system to other user groups, such as business, public administration

Spanish Legislation as Linked Data

Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance co-located with the 31st International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Groningen, NL, 12th of December 2018Legislation is officially published in Spain as HTML, PDF and XML. In the next few months, metadata will also be published as RDF, following the guidelines of the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) and using metadata records supported by the ELI ontology. The work presented here is an independent effort to publish Spanish consolidated legislation strongly linked to other external resources. In the published dataset, text is structured in articles; key terms are related to external terminological databases, named entities are identified, and links between internal and external documents have been automatically identified. The dataset is publicly available in a SPARQL endpoint

Enhancing Access to Legal Data through Ontology-based Representation:A Case Study with Brazilian Judicial Appeals

In Brazil, legal requirements for public information access, as mandated by Law no 12.527/2011, have amplified the role of the open data portals in disseminating data of collective and general interest. Despite legal provisions, there are persistent difficulties in presenting data in first-class semantic formats, which ultimately creates obstacles for digital citizens to fully exercise their newfound rights to information access. These obstacles can be addressed by building semantic data warehouses to enhance the use of open data through computational ontologies. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of a well-founded legal ontology for representing data from legal decisions extracted from a Brazilian judicial organ website. We focused our approach on a specific type of appeal in the Brazilian legal system, the Request for Standardization (RS) of interpretation of federal law, which seeks to standardize the understanding of the Appeals Panels of Federal Special Courts. Employing web scraping techniques, we built a complete ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process to triplify data on RS appeals and their rulings. We used a gUFO-based OWL renderization of a previously developed OntoUML ontology (called OntoRS) to transform the extracted data into a suitable RDF format and populate a Virtuoso triple store. Thus, the OntoRS ontology allowed us to perform SPARQL queries to obtain new insights, metrics and small RDF graphs.</p

Trust, Accountability, and Autonomy in Knowledge Graph-based AI for Self-determination

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have emerged as fundamental platforms for powering intelligent decision-making and a wide range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) services across major corporations such as Google, Walmart, and AirBnb. KGs complement Machine Learning (ML) algorithms by providing data context and semantics, thereby enabling further inference and question-answering capabilities. The integration of KGs with neuronal learning (e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs)) is currently a topic of active research, commonly named neuro-symbolic AI. Despite the numerous benefits that can be accomplished with KG-based AI, its growing ubiquity within online services may result in the loss of self-determination for citizens as a fundamental societal issue. The more we rely on these technologies, which are often centralised, the less citizens will be able to determine their own destinies. To counter this threat, AI regulation, such as the European Union (EU) AI Act, is being proposed in certain regions. The regulation sets what technologists need to do, leading to questions concerning: How can the output of AI systems be trusted? What is needed to ensure that the data fuelling and the inner workings of these artefacts are transparent? How can AI be made accountable for its decision-making? This paper conceptualises the foundational topics and research pillars to support KG-based AI for self-determination. Drawing upon this conceptual framework, challenges and opportunities for citizen self-determination are illustrated and analysed in a real-world scenario. As a result, we propose a research agenda aimed at accomplishing the recommended objectives

Named Entity Recognition and Linking in Greek Legislation

Δείχνουμε πώς η αναγνώριση οντοτήτων σε κείμενα Ελληνικής νομοθεσίας μπορεί να επιτευχθεί με την χρήση ενός αναγνωριστή ονομασμένων οντοτήτων (named entity rec- ognizer, NER). Η δουλειά μας είναι η πρώτη του είδους της που ασχολείται με την ελλη- νική γλώσσα σε τόσο βάθος και μία από ελάχιστες που μελετούν νομικό κείμενο. Εφαρ- μόζουμε αναζήτηση δικτύου (grid search) σε πολλαπλές αρχιτεκτονικές νευρωνικών δι- κτύων και συνδυασμούς υπερ-παραμέτρων (hyper-parameters) για να μεγιστοποιήσουμε την αποτε- λεσματικότητα της προσέγγισής μας. Δείχνουμε ότι, χρησιμοποιώντας ένα με- γάλο νομικό λεξικό χτίσαμε ενσωματωμένες/συμβολικές λέξεις (word/token-shaped em- beddings) χρη- σιμοποιώντας το Word2Vec και τελικά πετυχαίνουμε κατά μέσο όρο 86% ακρίβεια σε ανα- γνώριση οργανισμών, νομικών αναφορών, γεωγραφικών τοποθεσιών, ανθρώπων, γεω-πολιτικών οντοτήτων (GPEs) και δημοσίων εγγράφων. Η αξιολόγηση της μεθοδολογίας μας βασίζεται στις μετρικές της ακριβείας (precision), της ανάκλησης (recall) και της f 1 μετρικής (f1-score) ανά τύπο οντότητας για κάθε νευρωνικό δίκτυο. Τέ- λος, μετράμε την αναλογία των σωστά προβλεπόμενων συνδέσμων για την διασύνδεση RDF συνόλων δεδομένων (datasets) που παράγονται από την προσέγγισή μας με άλλα γνωστά σύνολα δεδομένων που έχουν εκδοθεί δημόσια και πώς μπορούμε να εξάγουμε νέα γνώση έμμεσα με την προσέγγισή μας από την DBpedia, το ELI (Europeal Legislation Identifier) και το GAG (Greek administrative geography, Ελληνική διοικητική γεωγραφία) του Καλλικράτη.We show how entity recognition in Greek legislation texts can be achieved by utilizing a named entity recognizer (NER). Our work is the first of its kind for the Greek language in such an extended form and one of the few that examines legal text. We apply grid search on multiple neural network architectures and combination of hyper-parameters to maxi- mize the efficiency of our approach. We show that, utilizing a big legal corpus we built word/token-shape embeddings using Word2Vec, and finally achieve 86% accuracy on av- erage in recognition of organizations, legal references, geographical landmarks, persons, geo-political entities (GPEs) and public documents. The evaluation of our methodology is based on the metrics of precision, recall, f 1 -score per entity type for each neural network. Finally, we measure the ratio of correctly guessed links for the interlinking of RDF datasets produced by our approach with well-known public datasets and how new knowledge can be inferred indirectly by our approach from DBpedia, ELI (Europeal Legislation Identifier) and GAG (Greek administrative geography) of Kallikratis

Ontology-based information standards development

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Standards may be argued to be important enablers for achieving interoperability as they aim to provide unambiguous specifications for error-free exchange of documents and information. By implication, therefore, it is important to model and represent the concept of a standard in a clear, precise and unambiguous way. Although standards development organisations usually provide guidelines for the process of developing and approving standards, they are usually more concerned with administrative aspect of the process. As a consequence, the state-of-the-art lacks practical support for developing the structure and content of a standard specification. In short, there is no systematic development method currently available: (a) For developing the conceptual model underpinning a standard; and/or (b) to guide a group of stakeholders to develop a standard specification. Semantic interoperability is considered to be an essential factor for effective interoperation – the ability to achieve semantic interoperability effectively and efficiently being strongly equated with quality by some. Semantics require that the meaning of terms, their relationships and also the restrictions and rules in the standards should be clearly defined in the early stages of standard development and act as a basis for the latter stages. This research proposes that ontology can help standards developers and stakeholders to address the issues of improving conceptual models and providing a robust and shared understanding of the domain. This thesis presents OntoStanD, a comprehensive ontology-based standards development methodology, which utilises the best practices of the existing ontology creation methods. The potential value of OntoStanD is in providing a comprehensive, clear and unambiguous method for developing robust information standards, which are more test friendly and of higher quality. OntoStanD also facilitates standards conformance testing and change management, impacts interoperability and also assists in improved communication among the standards development team. Last, OntoStanD provides an approach that is repeatable, teachable and potentially general enough for creating any kinds of information standard.Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe Ltd, Google Anitaborg Memorial Scholarshi