Fig 4 - uploaded by Marcello Ceci
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Qualifications produce expressions about how some legal entity (token qualified entity) is qualified by a type. A type can also be qualified on its turm, as conceptualized in the qualification pattern. For each class, some subclasses are provided as examples. The judged_as property is defined through a property chain of the main properties considered_by and applies.
Source publication
The article introduces JudO, an OWL2 ontology library of legal knowledge that relies on the metadata contained in judicial documents. JudO represents the interpretations performed by a judge while conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case. To the aim of this application, judicial interpretation is intended in the restricted sens...
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Citations
... Work Ceci and Gangemi [29] also has provided interesting insights into the construction of the Juridical Ontology: in particular, it describes an OWL ontology that represents the interpretations performed by a judge while conducting a discourse toward an adjudication. ...
Trial excessive duration is a common problem in Juridical systems worldwide, even if some countries seem to be more affected by it than others. The European Council has provided metrics and statistics to identify this problem and has pointed out solutions, such as the simplification of norms and the digitization of Juridical procedures. The Italian Telematic Civil Process (TCP) is an example of this digitization effort that has surely positively influenced the duration of Trials, their traceability and general complexity. However, there are still many possible actions that can be taken to simplify the work of Judges and Chancellors, and to support their daily operations in dealing with several Trials at once, and with the consistent number of documents that are involved in them. This paper presents a toolchain and a related methodology for the management of documentation attached to Trials, based on semantic technologies and Natural Language Processing techniques, which will help Judges in faster assessing the situation of each Trial they follow, and will also provide the means to identify potential correlations among different Juridical procedures. The methodology is tested against a case study, i.e. the compensation requests related to road accidents, which has been provided and described by Domain Experts from the Italian Ministry of Justice.
... For the assembly of documents in common law jurisdictions, where precedents are legally binding sources of law, knowledge from prior decisions should be formally represented and supported by the assembly method. For example, machine-readable representation of judicial opinions could be performed using an ontology as proposed in (Ceci and Gangemi 2016). ...
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In this paper, we present a method for introducing law students to the writing of legal documents. The method uses a machine-readable representation of the legal knowledge to support document assembly and to help the students to understand how the assembly is performed. The knowledge base consists of enacted legislation, document templates, and assembly instructions. We propose a system called LEDAS (LEgal Document Assembly System) for the interactive assembly of legal documents. It guides users through the assembly process and provides explanations of the interconnection between input data and claims stated in the document. The system acts as a platform for practicing drafting skills and has great potential as an education tool. It allows teachers to configure the system for the assembly of some particular type of legal document and then enables students to draft the documents by investigating which information is relevant for these documents and how the input data shape the final document. The generated legal document is complemented by a graphical representation of legal arguments expressed in the document. The system is based on existing legal standards to facilitate its introduction in the legal domain. Applicability of the system in the education of future lawyers is positively evaluated by the group of law students and their TA.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10506-022-09339-2.
... The result tells whether norms are violated or not. Ceci and Gangemi (2016) developed an OWL 2 judicial ontology library (JudO) representing the interpretations performed by a judge when conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case. On the other hand, Ceci in Ceci (2013) combines the features of description logic-based ontologies with non-monotonic logics such as the defeasible one. ...
This paper presents an approach for legal compliance checking in the Semantic Web which can be effectively applied for applications in the Linked Open Data environment. It is based on modeling deontic norms in terms of ontology classes and ontology property restrictions. It is also shown how this approach can handle norm defeasibility. Such methodology is implemented by decidable fragments of OWL 2, while legal reasoning is carried out by available decidable reasoners. The approach is generalised by presenting patterns for modeling deontic norms and norms compliance checking.
... It includes relational information about companies, entities, people, and actions. Ceci and Gangemi [17] present an OWL2-DL ontology library that describes the interpretation a judge makes of the law in providing a judgment while engaged in a legal reasoning process to adjudicate a case. This approach is based on a theoretical model and some specific patterns that use some newly introduced features of OWL2. ...
The internet and the development of the semantic web have created the opportunity to provide structured legal data on the web. However, most legal information is in text. It is difficult to automatically determine the right natural language answer about the law to a given natural language question. One approach is to develop systems of legal ontologies and rules. Our example ontology represents semantic information about USA criminal law and procedure as well as the applicable legal rules. The purpose of the ontology is to provide reasoning support to a legal question answering tool that determines entailment between a pair of texts, one known as the background information (Bg) and the other question statement (Q), so whether Bg entails Q based on the application of the legal rules. The key contribution of this paper is the methodology and the semi-automated legal ontology generation tool, a clear and well-structured methodology that serves to develop such criminal law ontologies and rules (CLOR).
... Judicial Ontology Library (JudO) [11] is an ontology enabling the representation of knowledge for reasoning and argumentation in judgments. JudO consists of two modules: a core ontology and a domain ontology. ...
... Even though the ontology covers many general legal concepts, more specific concepts in certain field of law need to be included in order to make it fully applicable to judgments. The Judicial Ontology Library (JudO) [9] consists of two modules: Core ontology (as an extension to the LKIF-Core legal ontology) and Domain ontology. Domain ontology represents the concepts and the rules related to the Italian Consumer Code, Italian Civil Code and some Italian Judgments containing an interpretation of private agreements Core ontology consists of three main classes: Qualifying_Legal_Expression (legal expressions which give legal status to a person), Qualification (includes legal acts which produce qualifying legal expressions), and Qualified (includes objects of a qualification) [9]. ...
... The Judicial Ontology Library (JudO) [9] consists of two modules: Core ontology (as an extension to the LKIF-Core legal ontology) and Domain ontology. Domain ontology represents the concepts and the rules related to the Italian Consumer Code, Italian Civil Code and some Italian Judgments containing an interpretation of private agreements Core ontology consists of three main classes: Qualifying_Legal_Expression (legal expressions which give legal status to a person), Qualification (includes legal acts which produce qualifying legal expressions), and Qualified (includes objects of a qualification) [9]. JudO mainly concentrates on representing and reasoning over the content of judicial decisions and so it lacks the concepts and relations needed for extracting domain specific relations from e-judgments. ...
With today's innovative technology, many courts across the country are moving to paperless systems and this resulted in the tremendous increase in the number of e-judgments. The sheer volume and the heterogeneous nature of the e-judgments demands text-mining techniques to extract legal relations from e-judgments. Relation extraction plays a major role in the legal domain by answering queries and finding out similar cases. Though many methods are available for extracting relations from natural language text, ontology based relation extraction is ideal for domain-specific tasks. In this paper, we present a legal case ontology that incorporates the concepts and relations present in the legal case domain by including the relevant terms from a set of real-life judicial decisions. The proposed ontology aims to support the extraction of domain specific taxonomic and non-taxonomic relations from e-judgments. Later, these significant relations would be useful for Text Summarization, Question Answering, and legal case based reasoning.
... They also demonstrated how this patent ontology can be utilized as a knowledge base for querying across these various domains, in order to aid patent related information retrieval. Ceci and Gangemi (2014) suggest a formal model of legal knowledge relying on the metadata obtained from judicial documents. The semantic model they propose is expressed in a form of Judicial Ontology library (JudO). ...
... Each of these top level hierarchy classes forms a new branch in the Legal Case taxonomy. Another legal domain semantic approach which served us as guideline in choosing the appropriate judgment metadata set, is JudO, an ontology library representing legal knowledge proposed by Ceci and Gangemi (2014). The semantic model they suggest is implemented relying on the metadata found in judicial documents. ...
This paper proposes a non-domain-specific metadata ontology as a core component in a semantic model-based document management system (DMS), a potential contender towards the enterprise information systems of the next generation. What we developed is the core semantic component of an ontology-driven DMS, providing a robust semantic base for describing documents’ metadata. We also enabled semantic services such as automated semantic translation of metadata from one domain to another. The core semantic base consists of three semantic layers, each one serving a different view of documents’ metadata. The core semantic component’s base layer represents a non-domain-specific metadata ontology founded on ebRIM specification. The main purpose of this ontology is to serve as a meta-metadata ontology for other domain-specific metadata ontologies. The base semantic layer provides a generic metadata view. For the sake of enabling domain-specific views of documents’ metadata, we implemented two domain-specific metadata ontologies, semantically layered on top of ebRIM, serving domain-specific views of the metadata. In order to enable semantic translation of metadata from one domain to another, we established model-to-model mappings between these semantic layers by introducing SWRL rules. Having the semantic translation of metadata automated not only allows for effortless switching between different metadata views, but also opens the door for automating the process of documents long-term archiving. For the case study, we chose judicial domain as a promising ground for improving the efficiency of the judiciary by introducing the semantics in this field.
... These works focus on improving the steps in the regulatorycompliance such as extraction, modelling, mapping and compliance checking. In order to achieve automatic compliance, the legal concepts, for example rights and obligations, have to be extracted and represented [5,6,16], and the business process must be modelled in some meaningful format such as ontology [17][18][19][20]. The ontologies or semantic representation of the regulatory guidelines and organizational processes makes the mapping between regulatory guidelines and organizational processes effective and efficient [21][22][23]. ...
The mapping of regulatory guidelines with organizational processes is an important aspect of a regulatory-compliance management system. Automating this mapping process can greatly improve the overall compliance process. Currently, there is research on mapping between different entities such as ontology mapping, sentence similarity, semantic similarity and regulation-requirement mapping. However, there has not been adequate research on the automation of the mapping process between regulatory guidelines and organizational processes. In this paper, we explain how Natural Language Processing and Semantic Web technologies can be applied in this area. In particular, we explain how we can take advantage of the structures of regulation-ontology and the process-ontology in order to compute the similarity between a regulatory guideline and a process. Our methodology is validated using a case study in the Pharmaceutical industry, which has shown promising results.
... More recently, research focused on formal models of legal argumentation, with analytical concepts such as dimensions and factors being replaced by more high-level figures such as values (Bench-Capon and Sartor 2003), argumentation schemes ( Gordon and Walton 2006), and intermediate legal concepts ( Grabmair and Ashley 2011). The use of factors to capture statutory interpretation has been already discussed ( Araszkiewicz 2011, Ceci andGangemi 2016), and the research presented in this paper builds upon that experience. ...
The continuous increase in quantity and depth of regulation following the financial crisis has left the financial industry in dire need of making its compliance assessment activities more effective. The field of AI & Law provides models that, despite being fit for the representation of semantics of requirements, do not share the approach favoured by the industry which relies on business vocabularies such as SBVR. This paper presents Mercury, a solution for representing the requirements and vocabulary contained in a regulatory text (or business policy) in a SME-friendly way, for the purpose of determining compliance. Mercury includes a structured language based on SBVR, with a rulebook, containing the regulative and constitutive rules, and a vocabulary, containing the actions and factors that determine a rule's applicability and its legal effect. Mercury includes an XML persistence model and is mapped to an OWL ontology called FIRO, enabling semantic applications.
... These kinds of initiatives by the aforementioned and other local, regional, and national governments (Catalonia, 29 France, 30 Italy, 31 the Netherlands, 32 Singapore, 33 etc.) show how the adoption of Semantic Web technologies in the administrative domain is widespread even for concrete uses and applications. 23 London Gazette homepage: http://www.london-gazette.co.uk. ...
... 29 Open public data of the government of Catalonia: http:// dadesobertes.gencat.cat. 30 Open platform for French public data: http://www.data.gouv.fr. 31 Italian public administration open data: http://www.dati.gov.it. ...
... In "An OWL Ontology Library Representing Judicial Interpretations" [30], Marcello Ceci and Aldo Gangemi introduce an OWL 2 DL ontology library making it possible to describe the interpretations a judge makes of the law while engaging in the legal reasoning on which basis a case is adjudicated. This ontology library is based on a theoretical model and on some specific patterns that exploit some new features introduced by OWL 2, and it provides meaningful legal semantics, while retaining a strong connection to source documents (i.e., fragments of legal texts). ...
Ontology-driven systems with reasoning capabilities in the legal field are now better understood. Legal concepts are not discrete, but make up a dynamic continuum between common sense terms, specific technical use, and professional knowledge, in an evolving institutional reality. Thus, the tension between a plural understanding of regulations and a more general understanding of law is bringing into view a new landscape in which general legal frameworks -grounded in well-known legal theories stemming from 20th-century c. legal positivism or sociological jurisprudence -are made compatible with specific forms of rights management on the Web. In this sense, Semantic Web tools are not only being designed for information retrieval, classification, clustering, and knowledge management. They can also be understood as regulatory tools, i.e. as components of the contemporary legal architecture, to be used by multiple stakeholders -front-line practitioners, policymakers, legal drafters, companies, market agents, and citizens. That is the issue broadly addressed in this Special Issue on the Semantic Web for the Legal Domain, overviewing the work carried out over the last fifteen years, and seeking to foster new research in this field, beyond the state of the art.
