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LEGAL ONtOLOGIES
In informatics, ontologies (Gruber, 1993) constitute an explicit formal
speciication of a common conceptualisation with term hierarchies, relations
and attributes that make it possible to reuse this knowledge for automated applications.
the formalisation must be on the one hand suficiently powerful
with regard to knowledge representation, and on the other hand must offer
functionalities for automation as well as tools to be produced automatically
(for lexically based ontologies, see hirst, 2004). thus, a legal ontology is a data
model of the legal order.
Ontologies in law have some particularities due to the legal domain and its
language. this legal text corpus is not inherently structured and a formal taxonomy
does not exist. Legal structuring as such is done by lawyers, in their
minds, and presented and made explicit in their argumentations and writings.
As a product of this process, a legal commentary is considered as the highest
level of this endeavour. the understanding of logic remains also quite different
from the formal logic of computer science: its open legal concepts, inherent
dynamics of law, system models and syntactic ambiguities provide strong impediments
to formalisation.
the motivation for the creation of legal ontologies is evident: common use
of knowledge, examination of a knowledge base, knowledge acquisition, representation
and reuse of knowledge up to the needs of software engineering
(Bench-Capon and Visser, 1997).
wAyS tO LEGAL ONtOLOGIES
As legal concepts constitute the basis for legal ontologies, all endeavours
for semantic representations or the development of thesauri can be seen as
preliminary works. the Semantic web, word nets and conceptual indexing
provide some insights into the proper strategy to achieve a suficiently developed
legal ontology.
As today’s web is mostly text-based, additional semantic data might
bring methods that could be used for the similar task in law. the Semantic
web can be considered as an extension to the current web in providing a
common framework that allows data to be shared and reused ( 5 ). According
to tim Berners-Lee, the Semantic web is ‘not a separate web but an exten-
( 5 ) website: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.
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