YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

the aim of fOLaw was the organisation and interconnection of legal
knowledge, in particular with regard to conceptual information retrieval. It
contained six basic categories of legal knowledge: normative knowledge, metalegal
knowledge, world knowledge, responsibility knowledge, reactive knowledge
and creative knowledge. fOLaw was used in follow-up projects. the
central dificulty of fOLaw proved to be the modelling of ‘world knowledge’.
the knowledge gained from fOLaw was used in the e-court project and in the
development of a core legal ontology, LRI-Core (Breuker and hœkstra, 2004).
within the framework of this project, a lexible, multilingual information retrieval
system using heterogeneous sources (audio, video, text) was developed
in the ield of criminal procedure.
Recent projects on legal ontologies are focused on vocabulary, thesauri
and lexical ontologies (Casanovas et al. 2007, LOAIt workshop).
POtENtIAL Of LEGAL ONtOLOGIES
for legal subsumption, factual conditions of an applicable rule have to be
clariied and checked. Legal ontologies should consist of a full description of
the world that would also constitute a statement of all factual situations for a
possible applicability of a norm. this knowledge representation would contain
objects and events from the world, its attributes and relations, and deinitions
and classes.
A representation of the legal order comprises all concepts of the legal system
providing a conceptual description and structuring of the legal order. Applicability
of a rule could be indicated by directly linking a norm to factual
situations described in the world ontology. with such an ontology, an electronic
commentary could be established containing a full description of a norm
with extensive links to related documents. further, it would provide the basis
for automatic legal reasoning.
In artiicial intelligence and law, the main problem has always been the
scaling-up, e.g. the move from a small to a reasonably big application. Legal
ontologies are no exception to this fact. the state of the art has to be described
as still experimental (Casanovas et al., 2007). therefore, a full ontological representation
of EUR-Lex cannot be advised as the theory has not suficiently
developed. however, interesting potential exists for ontological representations
in small and medium-sized sub-documentations of EUR-Lex. Such
smaller applications could be much more easily implemented and might show
the way to an ontological representation of the legal order. further, the present
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