Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed. During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments. This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.

The book provides the reader with a unique source regarding the current theoretical landscape in legal ontology engineering as well as on foreseeable future trends for the definition of conceptual structures to enhance the automatic processing and retrieval of legal information in the Semantic Web framework. It will thus interest researchers in the domains of the SW, legal informatics, Artificial Intelligence and law, legal theory and legal philosophy, as well as developers of e-government applications based on the intelligent management of legal or public information to provide both back-office and front-office support.

by Roberto Cencioni At the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, European heads of state and government set a new goal for the European Union — to become the most competitive knowled- based society in the world by 2010. As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens — at some points in their lives — have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group of professionals, and is a mul- billion business world wide. Information technology is important because it that can improve citizens’ interaction with law, as well as improve legal professionals’ work environment. Legal professionals dedicate a significant amount of their time to finding, reading, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to take decisions, and prepare advice and trials, among other tasks. As part of the “Semantic-Based Knowledge and Content Systems” Strategic Objective, the European Commission is funding projects to construct technology to make the Semantic Web vision come true. 1 The articles in this book are related to two current foci of the Strategic Objective : • Knowledge acquisition and modelling, capturing knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machi- processable knowledge.

Based on workshops and conferences on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law, this work deals with legal ontologies and Semantic Web applications, covering both theoretical aspects and practical systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 12th OWL: Experiences and Directions Workshop, OWLED 2015, held in Bethlehem, PA, USA, in October 2015, co-located with ISWC 2015, the International Semantic Web Conference. The 18 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 initial submissions. Bridging the gap between ontology engineering practices and software engineering, the papers describe reuse methods employed throughout the ontology development cycle; modeling / terminological decisions, alignment and comparison between ontologies, how ontologies are stored, versioned, distributed, and consumed over the Web.

Information technology has now pervaded the legal sector, and the very modern concepts of e-law and e-justice show that automation processes are ubiquitous. European policies on transparency and information society, in particular, require the use of technology and its steady improvement. Some of the revised papers presented in this book originate from a workshop held at the European University Institute of Florence, Italy, in December 2006. The workshop was devoted to the discussion of the different ways of understanding and explaining contemporary law, for the purpose of building computable models of it -- especially models enabling the development of computer applications for the legal domain. During the course of the following year, several new contributions, provided by a number of ongoing (or recently finished) European projects on computation and law, were received, discussed and reviewed to complete the survey. This book presents 20 thoroughly refereed revised papers on the hot topics under research in different EU projects: legislative XML, legal ontologies, semantic web, search and meta-search engines, web services, system architecture, dialectic systems, dialogue games, multi-agent systems (MAS), legal argumentation, legal reasoning, e-justice, and online dispute resolution. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation, ontologies and XML legislative drafting; knowledge representation, legal ontologies and information retrieval; argumentation and legal reasoning; normative and multi-agent systems; and online dispute resolution.

The Semantic Web is characterized by the existence of a very large number of distributed semantic resources, which together define a network of ontologies. These ontologies in turn are interlinked through a variety of different meta-relationships such as versioning, inclusion, and many more. This scenario is radically different from the relatively narrow contexts in which ontologies have been traditionally developed and applied, and thus calls for new methods and tools to effectively support the development of novel network-oriented semantic applications. This book by Suárez-Figueroa et al. provides the necessary methodological and technological support for the development and use of ontology networks, which ontology developers need in this distributed environment. After an introduction, in its second part the authors describe the NeOn Methodology framework. The book’s third part details the key activities relevant to the ontology engineering life cycle. For each activity, a general introduction, methodological guidelines, and practical examples are provided. The fourth part then presents a detailed overview of the NeOn Toolkit and its plug-ins. Lastly, case studies from the pharmaceutical and the fishery domain round out the work. The book primarily addresses two main audiences: students (and their lecturers) who need a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on ontology engineering, and practitioners who need to develop ontologies in particular or Semantic Web-based applications in general. Its educational value is maximized by its structured approach to explaining guidelines and combining them with case studies and numerous examples. The description of the open source NeOn Toolkit provides an additional asset, as it allows readers to easily evaluate and apply the ideas presented.