A Semantic Portal for Fund Finding in the EU: Semantic Upgrade, Integration and Publication of Heterogeneous Legacy Data

FundFinder is a Semantic Web portal that allows searching for and navigating through information about funding opportunities. This application has been created following a set of techniques and using a set of tools for the upgrade of legacy content to the Semantic Web, including databases and semi-structured documents. This process consists in extracting and populating knowledge from heterogeneous information sources and making it available on the Web

Empirically-grounded development of legal ontologies: a socio-legal perspective

This paper shows the multiple relationships between empirical data and semantic content in the legal field. One of the well-known problems of ontology construction is the "knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem" pointed out by Edward Feigenbaum and others, many years ago. In the next generation of Semantic Web developments this problem has not been completely solved. It is our con-tention that an accurate description of the legal environment, and well-grounded previous sociological studies may help to face it in a more satisfactory way. This means adopting a user-centered approach for legal ontologies, in what we will call an "iterative and integrated pragmatic circle" involving legal theorists, socio-legal researchers, professional people (lawyers, magistrates, prosecutors…) and com-puter scientists. We put the example of how the ontology of IURISERVICE was built up