Semantic Web - Volume 7, issue 3

Authors: Casanovas, Pompeu | Palmirani, Monica | Peroni, Silvio | van Engers, Tom | Vitali, Fabio

Article Type: Editorial

Abstract: Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a more general understanding of law is bringing into view a new landscape in which general legal frameworks – grounded in well-known legal theories stemming from 20th-century c. legal positivism or sociological jurisprudence – are made compatible with specific forms of rights management on the Web. In this sense, Semantic …Web tools are not only being designed for information retrieval, classification, clustering, and knowledge management. They can also be understood as regulatory tools, i.e. as components of the contemporary legal architecture , to be used by multiple stakeholders – front-line practitioners, policymakers, legal drafters, companies, market agents, and citizens. That is the issue broadly addressed in this Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, overviewing the work carried out over the last fifteen years, and seeking to foster new research in this field, beyond the state of the art. Show more

Keywords: Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, ontologies, Linked Data, Semantic Web and its applications, regulations, rights

DOI: 10.3233/SW-160224

Citation: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 213-227, 2016

Authors: Ceci, Marcello | Gangemi, Aldo

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The article introduces JudO, an OWL2 ontology library of legal knowledge that relies on the metadata contained in judicial documents. JudO represents the interpretations performed by a judge while conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case. To the aim of this application, judicial interpretation is intended in the restricted sense of the acts of judicial subsumption performed by the judge when he considers a material instance (token in Searle’s terminology), and assigns it to an abstract category (type ). The ontology library is based on a theoretical model and on some specific patterns that exploit some new …features introduced by OWL2. JudO provides meaningful legal semantics, while retaining a strong connection to source documents (fragments of legal texts). The application task is to enable detection and modeling of jurisprudence-related information directly from the text, and to perform shallow reasoning on the resulting knowledge base. The ontology library is also supposed to support a defeasible rule set for legal argumentation on the groundings of judicial decisions. Show more

Keywords: Legal knowledge modeling, ontology design patterns, case-based legal reasoning, judicial interpretation, OWL2

DOI: 10.3233/SW-140146

Citation: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 229-253, 2016

Authors: Francesconi, Enrico

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: A Semantic Web approach for an advanced access to legislative documents is presented in terms of a model of normative provisions and related axioms. In particular, relations between provisions are identified and modeled by introducing patterns able to describe Hohfeldian legal fundamental relations. Moreover, a query-based approach able to deal with relations between provision specific instances is described. Examples of semantic annotation of legal textual resources using RDF/OWL standards, as well as advanced access and reasoning facilities over provisions using SPARQL, are shown. The main benefit of the approach is represented by the ability to keep the complexity of the …problem within a description logic computational tractability. Show more

Keywords: Legal Semantic Web, normative provisions, provision relations, Hohfeldian reasoning, Description Logic, OWL-DL

DOI: 10.3233/SW-140150

Citation: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 255-265, 2016

Authors: Distinto, Isabella | d’Aquin, Mathieu | Motta, Enrico

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: This paper describes the construction of the LOTED2 ontology for the representation of European public procurement notices. LOTED2 follows initiatives around the creation of linked data-compliant representations of information regarding tender notices in Europe, but focusing on placing such representations within their legal context. It is therefore considered a legal ontology, as it supports the identification of legal concepts and more generally, legal reasoning. Unlike many other legal ontologies however, LOTED2 is designed to support the creation of Semantic Web applications. The methodology applied for building LOTED2 therefore seeks to find a compromise between the accurate representation of legal concepts …and the usability of the ontology as a knowledge model for Semantic Web applications, while creating connections to other relevant ontologies in the domain. Show more

Keywords: Legal ontologies, European public procurements, Linked Open Data, Open Government Data, tenders

DOI: 10.3233/SW-140151

Citation: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 267-293, 2016

Authors: Muñoz-Soro, José Félix | Esteban, Guillermo | Corcho, Oscar | Serón, Francisco

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Public procurement or tendering refers to the process followed by public authorities for the procurement of goods and services. In most developed countries, the law requires public authorities to provide online information to ensure competitive tendering as far as possible, for which the adequate announcement of tenders is an essential requirement. In addition, transparency laws being proposed in such countries are making the monitoring of public contracts by citizens a fundamental right. This paper describes the PPROC ontology, which has been developed to give support to both processes, publication and accountability, by semantically describing public procurement processes and contracts. The …PPROC ontology is extensive, since it covers not only the usual data about the tender, its objectives, deadlines and awardees, but also details of the whole process, from the initial contract publication to its termination. This makes it possible to use the ontology for both open data publication purposes and for the overall management of the public contract procurement process. Show more

Keywords: Ontology, public procurement, open government data, legal institution

DOI: 10.3233/SW-150195

Citation: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 295-309, 2016

Authors: Rodríguez-Doncel, Víctor | Delgado, Jaime | Llorente, Silvia | Rodríguez, Eva | Boch, Laurent

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The MPEG-21 Media Contract Ontology (MCO), a part of the standard ISO/IEC 21000, is an ontology to represent contracts dealing with rights on multimedia assets and intellectual property protected content in general. A core model provides the elements to describe the permissions, obligations and prohibitions exchanged in the clauses of a contract. Specific vocabulary is defined in a model extension to represent the most common rights and constraints in the audiovisual context. Design principles, a methodology and a comparative analysis are given, as well as the practical guidelines to use the standard. A thorough description of the contract creation workflow …from an original contract is given, including a sample contract text, the RDF version, the detailed mapping of the most relevant clauses and the reconstructed version. A set of MCO-related tools is described, including (i) the reference software to create and edit MCO contracts; (ii) modules to identify, store, search, validate and deliver MCO contracts and (iii) a tool to convert between the akin Contract Expression Language (CEL) contracts and the MCO contracts and (iv) the actual use of MCO in the Rightsdraw family of services. Show more

Keywords: Standards, knowledge representation, contracts, multimedia

DOI: 10.3233/SW-160215

Citation: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 311-332, 2016