Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies - Law, Governance and Technology Series 2011 edition

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Jacket Description/Back: Legal ontologies have proved crucial for representing, processing and retrieving legal information, and will acquire an increasing significance in the emerging framework of the Semantic Web. Despite the many research projects in the field, a collective reflection on the theoretical foundations of legal ontology engineering was still missing. This book bridges the gap, by exploring current methodologies and theoretical approaches to legal ontologies. It gathers 16 papers, each of them presenting issues and solutions for ontology engineering related to a particular approach to, or aspect of, the law: comparative law, case-based reasoning, multilingualism, complex- systems, sociolegal analysis, legal theory, social ontology, ontology learning, computational ontology, service ontology, cognitive science, document modelling, large legal databases, scientific, linguistic and legal-technology perspectives. The book will thus interest researchers in legal informatics, artificial intelligence and law, legal theory, legal philosophy, legal sociology, comparative law, as well as developers of applications based on the intelligent management of legal information, in both e-commerce and e-government (e-administration, e-justice, e-democracy)."Table of Contents: 1. Introduction: Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engineering: Experiences and Future Directions / Pompeu Casanovas, Giovanni Sartor, Maria Angela Biasiotti, Meritxell FernAndez-Berrera -- 2. The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies / Meritxell FernAndez-Barrera, Giovanni Sartor -- 3. Empitically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective / Pompeu Casanovas, NUria Casellas, Joan-Josep VallbE -- 4. A Cognitive Science Perspective on Legal Ontologies / Joost Breuker, Rinke Hoekstra -- 5. Social Ontology and Documentality / Maurizio Ferraris -- 6. The Case-Based Reasoning Approach: Ontologies for Analogical Legal Argument / Kevin D. Ashley -- 7. A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks / Pierre Mazzega, DaniEle Bourcier, Paul Bourgine, Nadia Nadah, Romain Boulet -- 8. The Multi-Layered Legal Information Perspective / Guido Boella, PierCarlo Rossi -- 9. Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective / Maria Angela Biasiotti, Daniela Tiscornia -- 10. A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling / Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone, Fabio Vitali -- 11. From Thesaurus Towards Ontologies in Large Legal Databases / Angel Sancho Ferrer, Carlos FernAndez HernAndez, JosE Manuel Mateo Rivero -- 12. The Computational Ontology Perspective: Design Patterns for Web Ontologies / Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti, Eva Blomqvist -- 13. A Learning Approach for Knowledge Acquisition in the Legal Domain / Enrico Francesconi -- 14. Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective / Roberta Ferrario, Nicola Guarino, Meritxell FernAndez-Barrera -- 15. Legal Multimedia Ontologies and Semantic Annotation for Search and Retrieval / Jorge GonzAlez-Conejero -- Author Index -- Concepts Index. Publisher Marketing: Approaches to legal ontologies constitutes a collective reflection on the foundations of legal ontology engineering, by exploring current methodologies and theoretical approaches to defining legal ontologies, their divergences and complementarity and the challenges still to be faced. It gathers contributions from leading experts regarding their theoretical commitments and methodological approaches derived from a long experience in the area and presents a mature reflection on achievements and current shortcomings. The various authors reconstruct their concrete methodological frameworks by retrieving the more or less explicit theoretical choices that have guided their work on legal ontology engineering over the last years. This results in the presentation of apparently opposed but in fact complementary rationales for ontology building in the legal domain (legal-theoretical, sociolegal, philosophical, among others) that address the various dimensions of legal knowledge and its conceptual modelling. 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.

Contributor Bio:  Sartor, Giovanni Sartor, The Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.