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Published in:
2005 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Types and Roles of Legal Ontologies
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In this paper, we propose a number of basic types and roles of ontologies, and use them as a basis to analyze several legal ontologies in the AI and Law literature. We discuss some dimensions in which to distinguish types of ontologies, for example considering their level of structure. We propose five main roles of ontologies in general: (a) organize and structure information; (b) reasoning and problem solving; (c) se-mantic indexing and search; (d) semantics integration and interoperation; and (e) understanding the domain. We then discuss example of works that have exploited each of these roles in the AI and Law literature. Further, we discuss some of the consequences of using ontologies to play each of these roles in terms of the level of structure of the knowledge represented in the ontologies, the kinds of knowledge representation formalisms they use, and the reasoning methods they employ.