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Is it good enough for the law to be written for lawyers?

Access to justice, Citizen participation in lawmaking, Collaboration in legal informatics, Crowdsourcing and free access to law, Crowdsourcing and legal information systems, Disruptive legal technology, Interdisciplinary collaboration in legal informatics, Legal publishing, Legal text mining, Legal text processing, Linked Data and law Comments Off on Is it good enough for the law to be written for lawyers?
Sep 182014
US Law Code

c.c. BY-SA 3.0. wikipedia.org

If you think that law isn’t written for lawyers, try reading some.  It can even start looking normal after a while (say about the length of time it takes to get through law degree).  But research on the main street impact of legal language suggests that for most people, the law is likely to be either incomprehensible or very hard to read.

This problem is a focus of a research project which a team of us at ANU and Cornell LII have been addressing over the past months (Eric McCreath (Australian National University, Research School of Computer Science), Wayne Weibel (Cornell University Law School, Legal Information Insitute), Nic Ceynowa (LII), Sara Frug (LII), Tom Bruce (LII) and myself (ANU)).  With the generous help of thousands of LII users, as part of a citizen science project, we’ve been collecting data on the readability of law as well as demographic data about the users of law.

If you are concerned about access to law, and many are, the current situation is not really good enough.  Whether you tend to ‘human rights’, ‘democratic values’, ‘economic efficiency’, ‘rule of law’ or are just wanting to make sure your hapless minions follow your every command, you’ll be able to think of a good reason why the law should be more accessible (readable) than it is.

Of course the problem has been around for a very long time, and plain language is a standing goal of many legislative drafting offices.  Reform efforts have been underway since the middle ages.  Certainly legal language has improved considerably, particularly as a result of 19th and 20th century reforms with that goal in mind.  Still, the law can’t be said to be readily accessible to the general public, in the sense of its readability.

What has changed that makes the problem more urgent today is that the general public can now at least get to the law.  That’s the revolution that’s been achieved by online publishers of the law, including the Free Access to Law Movement and official and commercial law publishers.  As the UK’s First Parliamentary Counsel observed last year:

Legislation affects us all. And increasingly, legislation is being searched for, read and used by a broad range of people. It is no longer confined to professional libraries; websites like legislation.gov.uk have made it accessible to everyone. So the digital age has made it easier for people to find the law of the land; but once they have found it, they may be baffled. The law is regarded by its users as intricate and intimidating.

In 2010, the Plain Writing Act was adopted by the US Congress with the aim of improving government writing. Sad to say, the Act itself is no model of plain language. Section, sub-section and paragraph roll on, line after line, provision after convoluted provision. In substance they say not much more than: write clearly so that the public can understand and use what you write.  Didn’t anyone see the irony?  Then again, reality check, most legislation is never read by the people who vote to make it law. Just to make sure the drawbridge was well and truly up, if you read through to the fine print at the end there is an important rider.  What happens if no one can understand what the law is supposed to mean? Well, nothing a judge can do about it.  Great aspiration, but …

A sea change could be on the way, though. The Good Law initiative is one great example of efforts to address the complexity and readability of legislation. What is significant is that how we are thinking about legal rules is changing.  Official publishers of the law are beginning to talk about the law as if it’s data.  The UK National Archives Office has even published an API — Application Programmers Interface (basically a ‘how to’ for developers who want to use the “data”).So now we’re thinking of law as data.  And we’re going to unleash computer scientists on it, to do whatever their imaginations can come up with. Bommarito and Katz‘ work on the legal code as a mathematical network is a great example of the virtually infinite possibilities.

Our own research uses the potential of computational technologies in another way. Online legal sites are not just ‘documents’.  They are places where people are actively interacting with the law. We used crowd-sourcing to engage with this audience, asking them to rate law on readability characteristics as well as exploring the demographics of who uses the law. Our aim was to develop a labelled dataset that could be used as input to machine learning. “Labelled data” is machine learning gold — hard to get, but if you can you get it, you can use it to make predictions about what human judges would say. In our case we are trying to predict whether a legal sentence will be readable or not.

In the process we learned quite a bit about the audience using the law, and about which law they use. Scouring the Google Analytics data, it became obvious that the law is not equally read. We may all be equal before the law, but the law is not equal before us. Just 37 sections of the US Code account for almost 10% of the page visits to US code pages (there are about 65,000). So a tiny fraction of the Code is being read all the time.  On the other hand there are huge swathes of the Code that hardly ever see the light of a back illuminated screen. This is not trivial news. Computer scientists love lists. Prioritised lists get their own special lectures for first year CS students — and here we have a prioritized list. You want to know what law is at the top of your priority list — the users will tell you. If you’re concerned with cleaning up the law code or making it easier to understand, there’s useful stuff here.

Ranking of sections by frequency of readership (on a logarithmic scale)

Ranking of sections by frequency of readership (on a logarithmic scale)

It will be no surprise that we found that law is harder for just about every part of the community than legal professionals.  What was surprising was that legal professionals (including law students), turn out to be a minority of those interested enough to respond, on the LII site at least.

These were just a few of the demographic insights we were able to draw.

On the machine learning front, we were able to show that machine learning can improve on traditional readability metrics  in predicting language difficulty (they’ve long been regarded as suspect in application to legal texts anyway). That said, it’s early days and we would like to extend the research we have done so far. There is a lot of potential for future research applying computational techniques to the readability of law.  A co-authored publication further describing the research introduced in this article will be presented at this year’s Law Via the Internet Conference being held at the end of September.

But while we’re thinking about it, there are other ways to think about `access’ to law.  What if instead of writing the law, it was visualized?  You know — like in pictures.  Before you storm off in contempt, note this: research is validating that pictures can improve user experience — for example in the contract space, where what your clients think of your contract can impact on your bottom line.

It’s radical enough unleashing computer scientists on legal rules. What might the law look like if we try thinking like designers?   ‘User experience’ of legal rules? That one didn’t come up in law school.  We’re in some surreally different world at this point. Designers create artefacts for people to use which are optimised for functionality, beauty and other characteristics –- not things that are meant to tell people what to do. ‘User experience’ is their kind of thinking.

As readers of Vox Pop will know, the idea of legal design is starting to get traction. Helena Haapio and Stefania Passera’s great article on legal design covers some of the field. An article they jointly published last year points out some of the benefits of visualization. Earlier this year, we worked on a joint paper exploring the feasibility of automating legal visualization. We were able to demonstrate the automation of visualization of clauses, such as a contract term clause, a liquidated damages clause or a payment clause. Visit our proof of concept site, where you can play with visualizing different options.

OK. So perhaps some of the above reads like we’re on the up-slope of the hype curve. But that of course is the fun. For those of us who’ve spent many years in the law, looking at the law from a different professional paradigm can help us see things that didn’t stand out before. It certainly enjoyable and brings a breath of fresh air to the law.

Michael CurtottiMichael Curtotti is undertaking a PhD in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University.  His co-authored publications on legal informatics include: A Right to Access Implies a Right to Know:  An Open Online Platform for Readability Research; Enhancing the Visualization of Law and A corpus of Australian contract language: description, profiling and analysis.  He holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of New South Wales, and a Masters of International Law from the Australian National University.  He works part-time as a legal adviser to the ANU Students Association and the ANU Post-graduate & research students Association, providing free legal services to ANU students.

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Other related posts on VoxPopuLII on this topic include Law in the Last-Mile: The Potential of Mobile Integration into Legal Services by Sean Martin McDonald, Incomprehension Compounded by Mistranslation – The Imperatives of Access to Legal Information in South Africa by Eve Gray and Accessible Law by Nick Holmes

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editors-in-Chief are Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger, to whom queries should be directed.

Posted by Michael Curtotti at 2:54 pm

Is it Time for Law Libraries to Collaborate on Description for Their Own Institutions’ Legal Scholarship?

Legal knowledge representation, Legal metadata, Legal ontologies, Legal publishing, Legal semantic web, Linked Data and law, Semantic annotation of legal texts, Semantic Web and law 2 Responses »
Sep 302011

Over the past couple of years, there has been a great deal of discussion — particularly in relation to the Durham Statement [1] — about technical standards and preservation issues for law reviews that publish openly and exclusively online.   Other colleagues have already blogged or written more formally about the lack of metadata being produced in the production of law reviews, and about problems in indexing open access law journal literature. [2]  In a previous VoxPopuLII post, Dr. Núria Casellas discussed the significance of semantic enhancement and how it affects how we should be thinking about providing access to legal information. [3]  So I would like to marry the two discussions, by formally asking my academic law librarian colleagues whether the time has come for us to work together to develop an ontology [4], a substantive knowledge system that could be used by our law schools’ legal journals in “marking up” content for consumption on the Internet.

This ontology should be applied not only to what we think of as traditional law journal content, but also to “related” content — such as companion blogs, video, data, etc. This related content will inevitably grow, as what we think of as a “journal” evolves. Indeed, a typical “journal” will most likely look very different years from now than it does today.  As members of the institutions that publish one of the major forms of literature in law, and as members of organizations that possess significant legal metadata and subject expertise, law librarians are uniquely positioned to facilitate the discoverability and utility of law reviews published on the Web.  Such a project also has the potential to support additional projects such as new metrics and ways in which to look at scholarship.

If this system were indeed widely adopted, it could facilitate a type of access to law journal content that has not been accomplished with existing, centralized means of access, such as Google Scholar, the ABA’s project, and commercial databases.  Ideally, I would like to see our community develop a cooperative that could provide a hosted technical infrastructure to be used by institutions that lack the financial or technical resources to invest in a major repository service or open source solutions.  While this idea seems “utopian” at this point, I think that our community could realistically pursue standards and language for the more “substantive” aspects of the metadata,  even if we are unable to agree on the ultimate solutions for preservation or platforms that “serve up”  the content.  Such an ontology could also serve as a precursor to even more ambitious, collaborative projects to make legal information more accessible and discoverable.

What do you mean by an ontology?  Don’t you just mean a taxonomy or “shared vocabulary”?

I frame the idea as an “ontology project” because publishing on the Web has increasingly become about structured, open, Linked Data and marking up content for the Semantic Web [4].  As the significance of Linked Data grows, it is important for us to think about access to legal scholarship in terms of knowledge systems that contemplate access to information in those terms. The use of structured data/schemas in publishing law reviews would be optimized by human knowledge/expertise for the expression of ideas and language to be applied in that data.  We need to think about subject access beyond the standard, familiar hierarchical “subjects” that we have come to use in our existing taxonomies, indexing, and classification systems.  [5]   We should be thinking about these “subjects” in a way that shows deeper interrelationships between concepts and “types” and that “interacts”  and is “interoperable” with other systems. The ontology approach contemplates access to information from a variety of perspectives in relational and situational ways.

Law reviews could be published in a way that incorporates a particular ontology that could also be mapped to other ontologies. Linking ontologies in this way would yield useful connections across systems, bodies of knowledge, and perspectives, including multilingual thesauri, interdisciplinary knowledge, and practice-oriented and “pro se” consumer perspectives.  Thinking about the project as an “ontology” also brings to mind three other important features of the system: (1) the “philosophical” definition of the term “ontology”; (2) the significance of “language” and subject expertise; and (3) the flexibility that would allow us to build something dynamic and responsive to the ever-changing nature of law.  Such an approach contemplates the approach to legal information advocated in Dr. Casellas’s piece. [6]

Don’t legal indexes already do this?  Why reinvent the wheel?

When some of these issues were raised last October at the workshop entitled “Implementing the Durham Statement: Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals”, someone asked why we should “reinvent the wheel” when other longstanding systems (e.g., law journal indexes) are already doing this.  Most of these longstanding systems are based on paid subscription models and are not open in a way that facilitates rapid response to evolving developments in the law, or use by those who consume legal information.  More importantly, this project would really be about facilitating publishing and improving access to online content by providing a quality, substantive, open knowledge structure for journals to use for marking up content and building access into publication. This project would not be an attempt to displace or “usurp” indexes which focus on access to content from the “outside” perspective of the publication itself (and which are increasingly concerned with marketable enhancements like full-text access, search features, user interface, Web 2.0 functionality, etc.).

The “wheels” we might be accused of reinventing also include “federated searching” and Web-scale discovery systems being purchased by libraries, but I think similar arguments about cost, perspective on the content, and scope would still apply.  Development of our project and adoption of Web-scale discovery systems are not mutually exclusive.  Web-scale discovery systems could potentially integrate and map to our system. In any event, the point is not to “throw out“ existing systems, but to create an additional knowledge structure that is open and potentially informed by and interoperable with other existing systems.

How would we proceed?

There are many approaches to ontology development [7], including derivation from or text-mining of legal texts [8], top-down development by humans, and building upon or extracting from existing ontologies.  [9]  Any of these methods (or a combination thereof) could work in the case of developing an ontological structure that could be applied to law review content.

A “top–down” approach based on the knowledge of individuals could start with librarians. But it should also involve working with law school faculty and scholars having expertise in particular subject areas, as well as with authors of law journal articles, and editors of law journals themselves (particularly those focusing on specialized legal topics).  [10]   Each law school has faculty and librarians who possess specialized legal subject knowledge — as well as collections in particular areas of law — that could enrich the project.  In addition to contributing their substantive knowledge, librarians would have an opportunity to develop a language and a system that reflect how they think about and look for information.

Other colleagues have already suggested greater engagement with law school faculty, for purposes of learning about how faculty conduct and think about research. [11]  A project like this would give us the opportunity to engage our  stakeholders respecting how they think about, contextualize, and relate topics.  (Perhaps we could learn more about the way law library stakeholders think about information by presenting them with samplings of articles, and inquiring as to how the stakeholders would “expect” to find those articles.)  Instead of forcing those knowledgeable about their field to learn the taxonomy and structure we have been given by traditional systems, we would be harvesting the expertise of those subject specialists in order to create richer metadata that contemplates their habits and knowledge. Faculty, authors, and journal editors with subject expertise coupled with law librarians could potentially provide a very sophisticated, dynamic, and responsive system.

We should also consider looking at existing ontologies and other systems, including Library of Congress and other popular and relevant systems used in law.  There are several ontologies related to law that could inform the project and that could also potentially be mapped. [12]  Systems to be consulted (and mapped) could include ontologies designed for primary law and local knowledge management in legal settings, as well as ontologies in subject areas outside the law.  Also, some law schools might have their own local systems that could inform ours.

Finally, while we would probably want to avoid using text mining as the only method, the project should also contemplate doing some mining and extraction from law journal literature itself.  Such an approach might be particularly helpful in grappling with older legal concepts and appreciating the use of certain terms/language over time.

Whatever method(s) we select, we have a host of inspiration from other projects in legal informatics and from projects in other disciplines (particularly in the sciences) that strive to provide naming conventions within disciplines, and map knowledge across systems through coordinated efforts. Although it is a much more ambitious project than ours, John Willbanks’ Neurocommons project provides us with a model of how such a project could garner participation and grow, particularly if we were to coordinate with other projects and ontologies being developed. [13]

If we build it, who will use it?

If we do develop such a system, who would actually apply it in publishing law reviews?  Hopefully, libraries will take the lead and realize that this is a role that they themselves should be fulfilling.  While many libraries facilitate repositories and other platforms for publishing law journals and provide training and reference/research support for cite checking and preemption, many do not provide markup and metadata work on the articles themselves.   In a recent survey by Benjamin Keele and me in relation to a paper we have been writing, only 1 in 57 respondents reported doing any work on article metadata for their journals. [14]  Librarians are already cataloging books and spending time grappling with metadata development and changes in the ways in which we describe our cataloged resources (RDA, FRBR, etc.). Further, librarians today spend a lot of time and money purchasing or building “repositories” or other platforms for their law journals.  Greater support of metadata development for our own institutional output (beyond provision of simplistic taxonomies) is a natural outgrowth of such activities.  As other librarians have commented, providing institutional repositories is not sufficient. [15]

Such activity could contemplate new roles for catalogers.  A recent NISO Webinar on the impact of Linked Data on library cataloging suggested that library catalogers will be less focused on creating “records” and more concerned with “graphs”. The presenters commented that catalogers will enhance the increasing amount of minimal metadata coming directly from publishers, and provide access to original and local content.   [16]   Some libraries have already integrated metadata work into their workflows for cataloged resources, and it is possible for a law library to integrate journal work into its technical services workflow. [17]  From a reference perspective, librarians are already often exposed to journal content in the early stages of publication through support of preemption checking, student note/comment research help, and cite checking support. Librarians are thereby in a good position to understand the “aboutness” of the content.  Such involvement could provide law librarians with a natural progression toward being more involved in helping journals “mark up” their content.  It is an opportunity for us embrace more wholeheartedly the role of law libraries as publishers and knowledge managers.  Many of our colleagues in the open law movement, in knowledge management in legal practice, and in other disciplines have made forays into this area. [18]

Some would probably argue that libraries do not have sufficient staff to get involved in law journal publishing activities, particularly in markup. In addition, some institutions have entire offices outside the library that support publication activities.  Even if libraries feel that they are not in a position to manage the workflow of the application of this knowledge system, the most important contribution librarians can make lies in expertise or intellectual input.    Application of this ontology could also be performed by law students themselves or other law school staff.     Further, authors themselves are potential users and providers of metadata.  In many other disciplines, especially the sciences, more authors are using author add-in tools and other software programs to help mark up their manuscripts for publication.  Specialized tools could be developed to facilitate authors’ adding metadata to their own law review articles.  (Many law authors are already used to contributing keywords to SSRN papers.)

“But…”: Obstacles and opportunities

As I write this piece, I anticipate comments such as, “That would be too big of an undertaking,” and:  “Is that really our role?”  While libraries are feeling the pressure of more limited resources and time, I would argue that this project would synergize with libraries’ existing interactions with our primary users (faculty and students) and could be built into other outreach activities.  In the end, it could actually help to create an organic system responsive to users’ needs.  Pursuing this project in tandem with other coordinated activities to facilitate open access law journals, law librarians would join many of our university library colleagues in thinking of ourselves in the role of producer/publisher and in providing new opportunities for our library staff (both technical services and reference/subject specialists).

I envision a host of other issues and problems (too many to enumerate in this posting) that might arise in relation to a project such as this, but I consider none of them “insurmountable.”  Below is a sample of some issues that come to mind:

Coordination/governance: Who would control the project?  Who would be the final arbiter of what is adopted?  Past discussions of the Durham Statement have suggested the possibility of an organization providing support for journals that tried to “comply” with the Durham Statement. [19] Such an organization might consider taking on a project such as this.  Perhaps leadership for this project could evolve in some way out of institutional and personal relationships, such as those that have evolved for collection development, [20] or possibly through some coordinated efforts of American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Special Interest Sections (particularly ALL-SIS, TS-SIS, and RIPS-SIS).  If our own institutions are not willing to support such a project, individual librarians on their own (myself included!) might be willing to contribute time and energy to the project.  We are also fortunate to have a supportive community of technologists in the open law and knowledge management fields, who could serve as potential partners.  The important aspects of the project are that it should be owned by an entity with diverse representation and interests, and that it should be established as something that will be free.

Target content and scope:   Would we be framing subjects as they tend to exist in U.S. law review literature?  While the structure would be designed for use by law reviews, if it were kept open and without restrictions, it could potentially be adopted by peer-reviewed journals and mapped to other indexing systems, either through Web-scale discovery or other systems.  How do we frame an ontology that contemplates incorporation of multiple legal systems and relation to multiple languages? How do we deal with the translation issues that may arise?  How would the ontology map to other systems and multilingual thesauri?  Should we be contemplating ontologies in other disciplines that have addressed these issues?

Could it be for naught? One might ask, “If we build it, will they come?”  Even if provided with such a system (as well as other best practices and support), would law reviews actually adopt it? Even if they do not apply such a system to their data structures, the substantive system that evolves could also be applied from the “outside” by third parties if the content itself is open.  While one could argue that this would truly be “reinventing the wheel” in duplicating the efforts of existing indexing systems, one could argue alternatively that the scope, nature, and openness of the resulting system would offer a unique contribution to the indexing environment and would at least provide an additional alternative to the existing systems.

Technical questions: Which particular tools should we use to work collaboratively?  What machine-readable formats would we contemplate using?  How would we deal technically with systemic changes to the ontology and its application?  There is a long list of tools and formats suitable for this project, and of methods for dealing with changes to metadata resources such as ontologies.

How would we contemplate application of this ontology in existing publishing platforms? What tools would we contemplate journals using to mark up documents with metadata from the ontology?  Many of the repositories and platforms libraries are currently using permit enhancement of metadata with keywords, user-generated tags, or existing basic subject categories. But existing repositories and platforms do not necessarily facilitate markup that is optimized for the Semantic Web.

Who is the audience? Who is looking for such an ontology? If the language and concepts are at least in part based on the needs and knowledge of our faculty and students, do we develop something tailored to their use instead of developing something that serves broader norms?  How could we take into consideration how others (pro se’s, court personnel, etc.) might be looking for information, and map or relate our ontology to other systems that incorporate those users’ perspectives?  How could we develop an ontology that contemplates relating to primary law?

Rights issues: Are there rights issues involved in adaptations or derivations of others’ ontologies?  How would we want to handle rights issues/licenses respecting the ontology that we develop? [21]  Hopefully, the answer is freely and openly!

So what do you think?

Hopefully, this post will spur a discussion that could be continued on this blog or in another forum.  In any event, law libraries should be rethinking their roles in the production of law review metadata. Law libraries should be considering how the evolution of the Semantic Web and cataloging standards might impact how they provide support for their own institution’s journals.

NOTES

This post is based in part on two draft papers: Benjamin Keele and Michelle Pearse, How Law Libraries Can Help Law Journals Publish Better (poster session presented during the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA on July 23-26, 2011),  and Michelle Pearse, Whither the Future of Law Journal Indexing?.

[1]  Richard A. Danner, Kelly Leong, and Wayne Miller, The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment, 103 Law Library Journal 39, 52 (2011), http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/2358/; Implementing the Durham Statement: Best Practices for Open Access Law Journals Conference, http://www.law.duke.edu/libtech/openaccess/conference2010 (October 22, 2010).

[2] Tom Boone, Librarians Key to Open Access Electronic Law Reviews,  http://tomboone.com/library-laws/2009/09/librarians-key-open-access-electronic-law-reviews (September 3, 2009) ; Sarah Glassmeyer, Getting to Durham Compliance, SarahGlassmeyer(Dot)Com, http://sarahglassmeyer.com/?p=442 (April 26, 2010);  Edward T. Hart, Indexing Open Access Law Journals…or Maybe Not, 38 International Journal of Legal Information 19 (2010), http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/ijli/vol38/iss1/5/.

[3] Dr. Nuria Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of Legal Information: Are We Up for the Challenge?, VoxPopuLII, http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/02/15/semantic-enhancement-of-legal-information%e2%80%a6-are-we-up-for-the-challenge/ (February 15, 2010).

[4] Some resources related to this topic appear at http://schema.org and http://linkeddata.org.  Some argue that the Semantic Web might already be ill-fated:  Janna Quitney Anderson and Lee Rainie, The Fate of the Semantic Web, http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP-Future-of-the-Internet-Semantic-web.pdf (Pew Research Center 2010). Tom Gruber defines an ontology as “a specification of a conceptualization”: http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html; Tom Gruber, in the Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Ling Kiu and M. Tamer Ozsu (Eds.), Spring-Verlag, 2009 http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontology-definition-2007.htm and  http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Ontology. Joost Breuker and colleagues elaborate: “The term ‘ontology’ may have different meanings: (i) philosophical discipline; (ii) informal conceptual system; (iii) a formal semantic account; (iv) a specification of a conceptualization; (v) a representation of a conceptual system via logical theory, (vi) the vocabulary used by a logical theory, (vii) a meta-level specification of a logical theory.” J. Breuker et al., “The Flood, the Channels and the Dykes,” in Joost Breuker, Pompeu Casanovas, Michael C.A. Klein and Enrico Francesconi, eds., Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channeling the Legal Information Flood (IOS Press 2009), at 11. Adam Wyner defines “ontology” in the following way: “An ontology represents a common vocabulary and organization of information that explicitly, formally, and generally specifies a conceptualization of a given domain.  Ontologies are related to knowledge management (cf. Rusanow’s ‘Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer’) and taxonomies (cf. Sherwin’s article ‘Legal Taxonomies’).  But an ontology is a more specific, explicit and formal representation of knowledge than provided by KM [knowledge management]; and it is richer and more flexible than a taxonomy….In making an ontology, one turns tacit expert knowledge into explicit representations that can be shared, tested and modified by people as well as processed by a computer.” Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, “Legal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web”, Law Technology News, http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews10/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1 (June 8, 2009).  Dr. Núria Casellas gives a good explanation of the Semantic Web and ontologies: Dr. Núria  Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of Legal Information: Are We Up for the Challenge? http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/02/15/semantic-enhancement-of-legal-information%e2%80%a6-are-we-up-for-the-challenge/ (February 15, 2010).

[5] Christopher A. Welty and Jessica Jenkins, Formal Ontology for Subject, 31 Journal of Knowledge and Data Engineering 155 (1999) (also available at  http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~weltyc/papers/subjects/subject.html);  Hope A. Olson, The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002); Knowledge Representation with Ontologies: Present Challenges – Future Possibilities, 65 International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 563 (2007), doi: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2007.04.003.

[6]  “In the subfield of computer science and information science known as Knowledge Representation, the term ‘ontology’ refers to a consensual and reusable vocabulary of identified concepts and their relationships regarding some phenomena of the world, which is made explicit in a machine-readable language.  Ontologies may be regarded as advanced taxonomical structures, where concepts are formalized as classes and defined with axioms, enriched with description of attributes or constraints, and properties.”  Dr. Núria  Casellas, Semantic Enhancement of legal Information: Are We Up for the Challenge? http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/02/15/semantic-enhancement-of-legal-information%e2%80%a6-are-we-up-for-the-challenge/.  See also Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, “Legal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web”, Law Technology News, http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews10/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1 (June 8, 2009) (suggesting Web-based collaborative ontology development where legal professionals contribute to a free, open ontology for law); Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, Weaving the Legal Semantic Web with Natural Language Processing, VoxPopuLII, http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/05/17/weaving-the-legal-semantic-web-with-natural-language-processing/ (May 17, 2010).

[7] Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis and Liam Magee, Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research (Chandos Publishing 2011), at 72 (noting several studies on investigating approaches and software); A Holistic Approach to Collaborative Ontology Development Based on Change Management, 9 Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 299 (2011), doi:10.1016/j.websem.2011.06.007; “Ontologies can be designed by means of methods such as…encompassing top-down expertise elicitation from humans, bottom-up learning from documents, and middle-out application of design patterns, which can be specialized from domain-independent ontologies, extracted from best practices, existing ontologies or other knowledge sources, as well as learnt from conceptual invariances found in experts’ documents.” Aldo Gangemi, “Introducing Pattern-Based Design for Legal Ontologies,” in Joost Breuker, Pompeu Casanovas, Michel C.A. Klein and Enrico Francesconi, eds., Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channelling the Information Flood (IOS Press, 2009), at 53.

[8] Enrico Francesconi, Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language (Springer 2008).

[9]  “Creating and developing ontologies requires domain expertise and the ability to capture this knowledge in a clean conceptual model.” Roberta Cruel, Olga Morozova, Markus Rhode, Elena Simperl, Katharina Siorapes, Oksana Tokarchuk, Torben Wiedenhoefer, and Fahri Yetim, Motivation Mechanisms for Participation in Human-Driven Semantic Content Creation, 1 International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Data Mining 331 (2011), doi: 10.1504/IJKEDM.2011.040653.

[10] This approach of working with faculty and other scholars from the legal academy would be similar to the “socio-legal” referenced by Dr. Casellas in her post regarding her Institute of Law and Technology project.  Dr. Adam Z. Wyner  has also advocated web-based collaborative ontolology development where legal professionals contribute to a free, open ontology for law. Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, “Legal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web”, Law Technology News, http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews10/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1 (June 8, 2009).

[11] Stephanie Davidson,  Way Beyond Legal Research: Understanding the Research Habits of Legal Scholars, 102 Law Library Journal 561 (2010),  http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/llj/LLJ-Archives/Vol-102/publljv102n04/2010-32.pdf; Richard A. Danner, Supporting Scholarship: Thoughts on the Role of the Academic Librarian, 39 Journal of Law & Education 365-386 (2010), http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/2071/ .

[12] Robert Richards, Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources: Knowledge Representation: Legal (Selected) http://www.personal.psu.edu/rcr5122/Ontologies.html; Robert Richards, Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources: General Resources for Application to Law,  http://www.personal.psu.edu/rcr5122/OntologiesGeneral.html; Joost Breuker, Pompeu Casanovas, Michael C.A. Klein, and Enrico Francesconi, eds., Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web: Channeling the Legal Information Flood (IOS Press 2009), at 12 (table of 23 ontologies).

[13] Alan Ruttenberg et al., Life Sciences on the Semantic Web: The Neurocommons and Beyond. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 10(2): 193-204 (2009), doi: 10.1093/bib/bbp004 (“The NeuroCommons project seeks to make all scientific research materials – research articles, knowledge bases, research data, physical materials – as available and as usable as they can be. We do this by fostering practices that render information in a form that promotes uniform access by computational agents – sometimes called ‘interoperability’. We want knowledge sources to combine easily and meaningfully, enabling semantically precise queries that span multiple information sources.”).

[14] Benjamin Keele and Michelle Pearse, How Law Libraries Can Help Law Journals Publish Better (poster session presented during the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA on July 23-26, 2011, http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/libpubs/25/).

[15] Tom Boone,  Librarians Key to Open Access Law Reviews, http://tomboone.com/library-laws/2009/09/librarians-key-open-access-electronic-law-reviews (September 3, 2009).

[16] NISO/DCMI, International Bibliographic Standards, Linked Data and the Impact on Library Cataloging (Webinar), http://www.niso.org/news/events/2011/dcmi/linked (August 24, 2011).

[17] Valeri Craigle, Legal Scholarship in the Digital Domain: A Technical Roadmap for Implementing the Durham Statement, Technical Services Law Librarian, at 1 (December 2010), http://www.library.illinois.edu/archives/e-records/aall/8501591a/news/TSLLdecember2010.pdf.

[18] See Dr. Adam Z. Wyner, “Legal Concepts Spin a Semantic Web,” Law Technology News, http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews10/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202431256007&slreturn=1 (June 8, 2009) (suggesting Web-based collaborative ontology development where legal professionals contribute to a free, open ontology for law).

[19]  Wayne Miller, A Foundational Proposal for Making the Durham Statement Real,  http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/2325/ (suggesting founding an organization “whose mission is to guarantee the ongoing viability and availability of all publications that adhere to the Durham Statement’s call to action, hereinafter called the Durham Statement Foundation.”);  Richard A. Danner, Kelly Leong and Wayne Miller, The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment, 103 Law Library Journal 39, 52 (2011), http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/2358/ (noting that the Durham Statement “calls for law schools to end print publication in a planned and coordinated effort led by the legal education community”).

[20]  Some examples include the Northeast Foreign Law Libraries Cooperative Group and  “B2F2” (currently in the process of being the process of being renamed) with Boston area law librarians.

[21] John Wilbanks, “Licensing and Ontologies: Research from Creative Commons,”  http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/IPR/OOR-IPR-01_IPR-landscape_2010-09-09/licensing-n-ontologies–JohnWilbanks-CC_20100909.pdf (September 9, 2010).

Michelle Pearse is the Research Librarian for Open Access Initiatives and Scholarly Communication at the Harvard Law School Library where she manages implementation of the law school’s open access policy for its faculty, and other projects related to scholarly communication and open access to legal information and scholarship.  She is also involved in efforts to archive born-digital content for the collection, and provides research services to faculty and staff.

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor-in-Chief is Robert Richards, to whom queries should be directed. The statements above are not legal advice or legal representation. If you require legal advice, consult a lawyer. Find a lawyer in the Cornell LII Lawyer Directory.

Posted by Pratt Judith at 8:28 am Tagged with: , , , , ,

Semantic Enhancement of Legal Information… Are We Up for the Challenge? [Revised Repost]

Cross-language legal information retrieval, information retrieval, knowledge management, Legal knowledge representation, Legal ontologies, Legal semantic web, Linked Data, Linked Data and law, Multilingual legal information retrieval, Semantic Web and law 1 Response »
Jan 182011

WorldLII[Editor’s Note: We are republishing here, with some corrections, a post by Dr. Núria Casellas that appeared earlier on VoxPopuLII.]

The organization and formalization of legal information for computer processing in order to support decision-making or enhance information search, retrieval and knowledge management is not recent, and neither is the need to represent legal knowledge in a machine-readable form. Nevertheless, since the first ideas of computerization of the law in the late 1940s, the appearance of the first legal information systems in the 1950s, and the first legal expert systems in the 1970s, claims, such as Hafner’s, that “searching a large database is an important and time-consuming part of legal work,” which drove the development of legal information systems during the 80s, have not yet been left behind.

Similar claims may be found nowadays as, on the one hand, the amount of available unstructured (or poorly structured) legal information and documents made available by governments, free access initiatives, blawgs, and portals on the Web will probably keep growing as the Web expands. And, on the other, the increasing quantity of legal data managed by legal publishing companies, law firms, and government agencies, together with the high quality requirements applicable to legal information/knowledge search, discovery, and management (e.g., access and privacy issues, copyright, etc.) have renewed the need to develop and implement better content management tools and methods.

Information overload, however important, is not the only concern for the future of legal knowledge management; other and growing demands are increasing the complexity of the requirements that legal information management systems and, in consequence, legal knowledge representation must face in the future. Multilingual search and retrieval of legal information to enable, for example, integrated search between the legislation of several European countries; enhanced laypersons’ understanding of and access to e-government and e-administration sites or online dispute resolution capabilities (e.g., BATNA determination); the regulatory basis and capabilities of electronic institutions or normative and multi-agent systems (MAS); and multimedia, privacy or digital rights management systems, are just some examples of these demands.

How may we enable legal information interoperability? How may we foster legal knowledge usability and reuse between information and knowledge systems? How may we go beyond the mere linking of legal documents or the use of keywords or Boolean operators for legal information search? How may we formalize legal concepts and procedures in a machine-understandable form?

In short, how may we handle the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal information search and retrieval or knowledge management, taking into account the structure and dynamic character of legal knowledge, its relation with common sense concepts, the distinct theoretical perspectives, the flavor and influence of legal practice in its evolution, and jurisdictional and linguistic differences?

These are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed. Here, I would like to draw your attention to the development of semantic solutions and applications and the construction of formal structures for representing legal concepts in order to make human-machine communication and understanding possible.

Semantic metadata

For example, in the search and retrieval area, we still perform nowadays most legal searches in online or application databases using keywords (that we believe to be contained in the document that we are searching for), maybe together with a combination of Boolean operators, or supported with a set of predefined categories (metadata regarding, for example, date, type of court, etc.), a list of pre-established topics, thesauri (e.g., EuroVoc), or a synonym-enhanced search.

These searches rely mainly on syntactic matching, and — with the exception of searches enhanced with categories, synonyms, or thesauri — they will return only documents that contain the exact term searched for. To perform more complex searches, to go beyond the term, we require the search engine to understand the semantic level of legal documents; a shared understanding of the domain of knowledge becomes necessary.

Although the quest for the representation of legal concepts is not new, these efforts have recently been driven by the success of the World Wide Web (WWW) and, especially, by the later development of the Semantic Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee described it as an extension of the Web “in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0

Thus, the Semantic Web is envisaged as an extension of the current Web, which now comprises collaborative tools and social networks (the Social Web or Web 2.0). The Semantic Web is sometimes also referred to as Web 3.0, although there is no widespread agreement on this matter, as different visions exist regarding the enhancement and evolution of the current Web.

These efforts also include the Web of Data (or Linked Data), which relies on the existence of standard formats (URIs, HTTP and RDF) to allow the access and query of interrelated datasets, which may be granted through a SPARQL endpoint (e.g., Govtrack.us, US census data, etc.). Sharing and connecting data on the Web in compliance with the Linked Data principles enables the exploitation of content from different Web data sources with the development of search, browse, and other mashup applications. (See the Linking Open Data cloud diagram by Cyganiak and Jentzsch below.) [Editor’s Note: Legislation.gov.uk also applies Linked Data principles to legal information, as John Sheridan explains in his recent post.]

LinkedData

Thus, to allow semantics to be added to the current Web, new languages and tools (ontologies) were needed, as the development of the Semantic Web is based on the formal representation of meaning in order to share with computers the flexibility, intuition, and capabilities of the conceptual structures of human natural languages. In the subfield of computer science and information science known as Knowledge Representation, the term “ontology” refers to a consensual and reusable vocabulary of identified concepts and their relationships regarding some phenomena of the world, which is made explicit in a machine-readable language. Ontologies may be regarded as advanced taxonomical structures, Semantic Web Stackwhere concepts are formalized as classes and defined with axioms, enriched with the description of attributes or constraints, and properties.

The task of developing interoperable technologies (ontology languages, guidelines, software, and tools) has been taken up by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These technologies were arranged in the Semantic Web Stack according to increasing levels of complexity (like a layer cake). In this stack, higher layers depend on lower layers (and the latter are inherited from the original Web). These languages include XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a superset of HTML usually used to add structure to documents, and the so-called ontology languages: RDF/RDFS (Resource Description Framework/Schema), OWL, and OWL2 (Ontology Web Language). While the RDF language offers simple descriptive information about the resources on the Web, encoded in sets of triples of subject (a resource), predicate (a property or relation), and object (a resource or a value), RDFS allows the description of sets. OWL offers an even more expressive language to define structured ontologies (e.g. class disjointess, union or equivalence, etc.

Moreover, a specification to support the conversion of existing thesauri, taxonomies or subject headings into RDF triples has recently been published: the SKOS, Simple Knowledge Organization System standard. These specifications may be exploited in Linked Data efforts, such as the New York Times vocabularies. Also, EuroVoc, the multilingual thesaurus for activities of the EU is, for example, now available in this format.

Although there are different views in the literature regarding the scope of the definition or main characteristics of ontologies, the use of ontologies is seen as the key to implementing semantics for human-machine communication. Many ontologies have been built for different purposes and knowledge domains, for example:

  • OpenCyc: an open source version of the Cyc general ontology;
  • SUMO: the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology;
  • the upper ontologies PROTON (PROTo Ontology) and DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering);
  • the FRBRoo model (which represents bibliographic information);
  • the RDF representation of Dublin Core;
  • the Gene Ontology;
  • the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology.

Although most domains are of interest for ontology modeling, the legal domain offers a perfect area for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation to be used in different types of intelligent applications and legal reasoning systems, not only due to its complexity as a knowledge intensive domain, but also because of the large amount of data that it generates. The use of semantically-enabled technologies for legal knowledge management could provide legal professionals and citizens with better access to legal information; enhance the storage, search, and retrieval of legal information; make possible advanced knowledge management systems; enable human-computer interaction; and even satisfy some hopes respecting automated reasoning and argumentation.

Regarding the incorporation of legal knowledge into the Web or into IT applications, or the more complex realization of the Legal Semantic Web, several directions have been taken, such as the development of XML standards for legal documentation and drafting (including Akoma Ntoso, LexML, CEN Metalex, and Norme in Rete), and the construction of legal ontologies.

Ontologizing legal knowledge

During the last decade, research on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has increased and, as a consequence, a very interesting debate about their capacity to represent legal concepts and their relation to the different existing legal theories has arisen. It has even been suggested that ontologies could be the “missing link” between legal theory and Artificial Intelligence.

The literature suggests that legal ontologies may be distinguished by the levels of abstraction of the ideas they represent, the key distinction being between core and domain levels. Legal core ontologies model general concepts which are believed to be central for the understanding of law and may be used in all legal domains. In the past, ontologies of this type were mainly built upon insights provided by legal theory and largely influenced by normativism and legal positivism, especially by the works of Hart and Kelsen. Thus, initial legal ontology development efforts in Europe were influenced by hopes and trends in research on legal expert systems based on syllogistic approaches to legal interpretation.

More recent contributions at that level include the LKIF-Core Ontology, the LRI-Core Ontology, the DOLCE+CLO (Core Legal Ontology), and the Ontology of Fundamental Legal Concepts.Blue Scene Such ontologies usually include references to the concepts of Norm, Legal Act, and Legal Person, and may contain the formalization of deontic operators (e.g., Prohibition, Obligation, and Permission).

Domain ontologies, on the other hand, are directed towards the representation of conceptual knowledge regarding specific areas of the law or domains of practice, and are built with particular applications in mind, especially those that enable communication (shared vocabularies), or enhance indexing, search, and retrieval of legal information. Currently, most legal ontologies being developed are domain-specific ontologies, and some areas of legal knowledge have been heavily targeted, notably the representation of intellectual property rights respecting digital rights management (IPROnto Ontology, the Copyright Ontology, the Ontology of Licences, and the ALIS IP Ontology), and consumer-related legal issues (the Customer Complaint Ontology (or CContology), and the Consumer Protection Ontology). Many other well-documented ontologies have also been developed for purposes of the detection of financial fraud and other crimes; the representation of alternative dispute resolution methods, privacy compliance, patents, cases (e.g., Legal Case OWL Ontology), judicial proceedings, legal systems, and argumentation frameworks; and the multilingual retrieval of European law, among others. (See, for example, the proceedings of the JURIX and ICAIL conferences for further references.)

A socio-legal approach to legal ontology development

Thus, there are many approaches to the development of legal ontologies. Nevertheless, in the current legal ontology literature there are few explicit accounts or insights into the methods researchers use to elicit legal knowledge, and the accounts that are available reflect a lack of consensus as to the most appropriate methodology. For example, some accounts focus solely on the use of text mining techniques towards ontology learning from legal texts; while others concentrate on the analysis of legal theories and related materials to extract and formalize legal concepts. Moreover, legal ontology researchers disagree about the role that legal experts should play in ontology development and validation.

Orange SceneIn this regard, at the Institute of Law and Technology, we are developing a socio-legal approach to the construction of legal conceptual models. This approach stems from our collaboration with firms, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations (and their experts, clients, and other users) for the gathering of either explicit or tacit knowledge according to their needs. This empirically-based methodology may require the modeling of legal knowledge in practice (or professional legal knowledge, PLK), and the acquisition of knowledge through ethnographic and other social science research methods, together with the extraction (and merging) of concepts from a range of different sources (acts, regulations, case law, protocols, technical reports, etc.) and their validation by both legal experts and users.

For example, the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) was developed in collaboration with the Spanish School of the Judicary to enhance search and retrieval capabilities of a Web-based frequentl- asked-question system (IURISERVICE) containing a repository of practical knowledge for Spanish judges in their first appointment. The knowledge was elicited from an ethnographic survey in Spanish First Instance Courts. On the other hand, the Neurona Ontologies, for a data protection compliance application, are based on the knowledge of legal experts and the requirements of enterprise asset management, together with the analysis of privacy and data protection regulations and technical risk management standards.

This approach tries to take into account many of the criticisms that developers of legal knowledge-based systems (LKBS) received during the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, including, primarily, the lack of legal knowledge or legal domain understanding of most LKBS development teams at the time. These criticisms were rooted in the widespread use of legal sources (statutes, case law, etc.) directly as the knowledge for the knowledge base, instead of including in the knowledge base the “expert” knowledge of lawyers or law-related professionals.

Further, in order to represent knowledge in practice (PLK), legal ontology engineering could benefit from the use of social science research methods for knowledge elicitation, institutional/organizational analysis (institutional ethnography), as well as close collaboration with legal practitioners, users, experts, and other stakeholders, in order to discover the relevant conceptual models that ought to be represented in the ontologies. Moreover, I understand the participation of these stakeholders in ontology evaluation and validation to be crucial to ensuring consensus about, and the usability of, a given legal ontology.

Challenges and drawbacks

Although the use of ontologies and the implementation of the Semantic Web vision may offer great advantages to information and knowledge management, there are great challenges and problems to be overcome.

First, the problems related to knowledge acquisition techniques and bottlenecks in software engineering are inherent in ontology engineering, and ontology development is quite a time-consuming and complex task. Second, as ontologies are directed mainly towards enabling some communication on the basis of shared conceptualizations, how are we to determine the sharedness of a concept? And how are context-dependencies or (cultural) diversities to be represented? Furthermore, how can we evaluate the content of ontologies?

Collaborative Current research is focused on overcoming these problems through the establishment of gold standards in concept extraction and ontology learning from texts, and the idea of collaborative development of legal ontologies, although these techniques might be unsuitable for the development of certain types of ontologies. Also, evaluation (validation, verification, and assessment) and quality measurement of ontologies are currently an important topic of research, especially ontology assessment and comparison for reuse purposes.

Regarding ontology reuse, the general belief is that the more abstract (or core) an ontology is, the less it owes to any particular domain and, therefore, the more reusable it becomes across domains and applications. This generates a usability-reusability trade-off that is often difficult to resolve.

Finally, once created, how are these ontologies to evolve? How are ontologies to be maintained and new concepts added to them?

Over and above these issues, in the legal domain there are taking place more particularized discussions:  for example, the discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of adopting an empirically based perspective (bottom-up), and the complexity of establishing clear connections with legal dogmatics or general legal theory approaches (top-down). To what extent are these two different perspectives on legal ontology development incompatible? How might they complement each other? What is their relationship with text-based approaches to legal ontology modeling?

I would suggest that empirically based, socio-legal methods of ontology construction constitute a bottom-up approach that enhances the usability of ontologies, while the general legal theory-based approach to ontology engineering fosters the reusability of ontologies across multiple domains.

The scholarly discussion of legal ontology development also embraces more fundamental issues, among them the capabilities of ontology languages for the representation of legal concepts, the possibilities of incorporating a legal flavor into OWL, and the implications of combining ontology languages with the formalization of rules.

Finally, the potential value to legal ontology of other approaches, areas of expertise, and domains of knowledge construction ought to be explored, for example: pragmatics and sociology of law methodologies, experiences in biomedical ontology engineering, formal ontology approaches, salamander.jpgand the relationships between legal ontology and legal epistemology, legal knowledge and common sense or world knowledge, expert and layperson’s knowledge, legal information and Linked Data possibilities, and legal dogmatics and political science (e.g., in e-Government ontologies).

As you may see, the challenges faced by legal ontology engineering are great, and the limitations of legal ontologies are substantial. Nevertheless, the potential of legal ontologies is immense. I believe that law-related professionals and legal experts have a central role to play in the successful development of legal ontologies and legal semantic applications.

[Editor’s Note: For many of us, the technical aspects of ontologies and the Semantic Web are unfamiliar. Yet these technologies are increasingly being incorporated into the legal information systems that we use everyday, so it’s in our interest to learn more about them. For those of us who would like a user-friendly introduction to ontologies and the Semantic Web, here are some suggestions:

Dr. Núria Casellas Dr. Núria Casellas is a visiting researcher at the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University. She is a researcher at the Institute of Law and Technology and an assistant professor at the UAB Law School (on leave). She has participated in several national and European-funded research projects regarding legal ontologies and legal knowledge management: these concern the acquisition of knowledge in judicial settings (IURISERVICE), modeling privacy compliance regulations (NEURONA), drafting legislation (DALOS), and the Legal Case Study of the Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies (SEKT VI Framework project), among others. Co-editor of the IDT Series, she holds a Law Degree from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, a Master’s Degree in Health Care Ethics and Law from the University of Manchester, and a PhD (“Modelling Legal Knowledge through Ontologies. OPJK: the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge”).

VoxPopuLII is edited by Judith Pratt. Editor in Chief is Robert Richards.

Posted by Richards Robert at 11:31 pm Tagged with: