"What exactly is a lockdown?":Towards an Ontology-based modeling of lockdown interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic posed several research opportunities raised by the huge amount of data collected and made available at an unprecedented rate. However, this also raised important challenges for manipulating all this data and extracting knowledge from it, due to the lack of semantically precise definitions. In particular, several locations imposed lockdown measures for some periods, with different meanings among them. These semantic differences might help to explain why different countries - which at first sight enforced similar sets of interventions - evolved in a completely distinct way with respect to the propagation rate of COVID-19. In this work, we report an ontological analysis of some lockdown interventions. These interventions are classified in the same category in a taxonomy provided by a worldwide initiative that tracks information on interventions from governments of several countries taken to tackle COVID-19. However, as our analysis shows, there are important ontological distinctions among them. Based on these results, we propose an initial version of a domain ontology that represents lockdown as a complex non-pharmaceutical intervention type, which is composed of interventions of several natures, and that provides a legal perspective of some of its composing interventions using patterns from the UFO-L legal core ontology.</p

Legal Theories and Judicial Decision-Making: An Ontological Analysis

In this paper, we expose the legal theories underlying two important classes of Legal Core Ontologies and show how these ontologies inherit both limitations and benefits (such as explanatory power) of their underlying theories. We do that with the help of a real case study in which we have normative omission and collision of principles. We use this case study to conduct an ontological analysis of the support for judicial decision-making in LKIF-Core (representing Kelsen's Pure Theory of the Law) and UFO-L (representing Robert Alexy's Theory of Constitutional Rights). We show that UFO-L is able to articulate the semantics of the content of judicial decisions by making explicit the individual's legal positions that are raised in argumentation along a legal process. The same cannot be said of LKIF-Core that is based on the Kelsenian stance and focuses on the representation of general norms (norm types) and subsumption of facts to these norms

Casting the light of the theory of opposition onto Hohfeld's fundamental legal concepts

At the core of Hohfeld's contribution to legal theory is a conceptual framework for the analysis of the legal positions occupied by agents in intersubjective legal relations. Hohfeld presented a system of eight fundamental concepts relying on notions of opposition and correlation. Throughout the years, a number of authors have followed Hohfeld in applying the notion of opposition to analyze legal concepts. Many of these authors have accounted for Hohfeld's theory in direct analogy with the standard deontic hexagon. This paper reviews some of these accounts and extends them employing recent developments from opposition theory. In particular, we are able to extend application of opposition theory to an open conception of the law. We also account for the implications of abandoning the assumption of conflict-freedom and admitting seemingly conflicting legal positions. This enables a fuller analysis of Hohfeld's conceptual analytical framework. We also offer a novel analysis of Hohfeld's power positions.</p

Modeling the dynamics of contractual relations

Contracts usually have clauses that enable contracted parties to adjust their contractual positions in time, e.g., to relieve another party from duty or to grant new permission. This is especially important in long-running service relations, which require contracts to be adjusted to accommodate new or unforeseen circumstances. Despite that, the representation of dynamic aspects of contractual relations has not been given enough attention in the literature. In this study, we address this gap by employing the notions of legal power and legal subjection. We propose an ontological analysis of unilateral contractual changes based on a well-founded legal core ontology that adopts a relational perspective for legal positions. We present a case study to show the benefits of representing different types of contractual changes and how these changes can impact contractual dynamics. The case study is based on recent changes to WhatsApp terms of service.</p

A Practical Application of Upon Lite for the Development of a Semi-Informal Application Ontology

The UPON Lite methodology is developed as a lightweight approach for Ontology Engineering. In contrast to more rigorous engineering methods, UPON Lite is oriented towards a reduced dependence on ontology engineers, which ensures its ease of use for the development of application ontologies. The existing scientific literature reports on six practical applications of the approach in several domains, but they lack a detailed elaboration of the development process that was followed. Therefore, this paper investigates how the UPON Lite development process is reproducible in an actual business context. This is achieved by a case study analysis of UPON Lite in the context of a public organization. For each step of the methodology, the analysis lists the guidelines of the seminal work and describes the case study implementation. This is the starting point for a further operationalization of UPON Lite to increase its adoption in academia and practice

A decentralized fair governance model for permissionless blockchain systems

Blockchain systems are a new way to reduce or even eliminate the role of the middlemen in an eco-system. For example, the Bitcoin, as one of the most well-known blockchain platforms, shows that it is possible to transfer money without the need of any (intermediate) bank at all. More generally, it allows for the decentralization of roles. In this paper, we focus on permissionless blockchains, which are systems that allow participation without upfront approval on other parties, as opposed to permissioned blockchains. Permissionless blockchain systems support direct business transactions between peers, so without any intermediate and centralized entity very well. However, the organization of the governance of such systems is less obvious. We argue that, in order to arrive at a really decentralized eco-system where power is fairly distributed, the governance should be decentralized; in other words, it should not be in the hand of one controlling entity. In this paper, we analyse, in a model-based way, for three well-known blockchain systems (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos) the governance processes. Based on this analysis, we draft an improved governance process for permissionless blockchains

Legal Power-Subjection Relations: Ontological Analysis and Modeling Pattern

The development of dependable information systems in legal contexts requires a precise understanding of the subtleties of the underlying legal phenomena. According to a modern understanding in philosophy of law, much of these phenomena are relational in nature. In this paper, we employ a theoretically well-grounded legal core ontology (UFO-L) to conduct an ontological analysis focused on a fundamental legal relation, namely, the power-subjection relation. We show that in certain cases, power-subjection relations are primitive, i.e., by means of institutional acts, other legal relations can be generated from them. Examples include relations of rights and duties, permissions and non-rights, liberties, secondary power-subjection, etc. As a contribution to the practice of conceptual modeling, and leveraging on the result of our analysis, we propose a conceptual modeling pattern, which is then applied to model a real-world case in tax law