Semantic Web Technologies and Legal Scholarly Publishing

verfasst von: Silvio Peroni

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buchreihe : Law, Governance and Technology Series

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This work deals with the applications of Semantic Publishing technologies in the legal domain, i.e., the use of Semantic Web technologies to address issues related to the Legal Scholarly Publishing. Research in the field of Law has a long tradition in the application of semantic technologies, such as Semantic Web and Linked Data, to real-world scenarios. This book investigates and proposes solutions for three main issues that Semantic Publishing needs to address within the context of the Legal Scholarly Publishing: the need of tools for linking document text to a formal representation of its meaning; the lack of complete metadata schemas for describing documents according to the publishing vocabulary and the absence of effective tools and user interfaces for easily acting on semantic publishing models and theories.

In particular, this work introduces EARMARK, a markup meta language that allows one to create markup documents without the structural and semantic limits imposed by markup languages such as XML. EARMARK is a platform to link the content layer of a document with its intended formal semantics and it can be used with the Semantic Publishing and Referencing (SPAR) Ontologies, another topic in this book. SPAR Ontologies are a collection of formal models providing an upper semantic layer for describing the publishing domain. Using EARMARK as a foundation for SPAR descriptions opens up to a semantic characterisation of all the aspects of a document and of its parts. Finally, four user-friendly tools are introduced: LODE, KC-Viz, Graffoo and Gaffe. They were expressly developed to facilitate the interaction of publishers and domain experts with Semantic Publishing technologies by shielding such users from the underlying formalisms and semantic models of such technologies.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. Introduction

Abstract

This book describes applications in the legal domain of the increasing relationships between two distinct multidisciplinary research fields, Semantic Web technologies and scholarly publishing, that converge in the field called Semantic Publishing. In the spirit of the original aim of Semantic Publishing, i.e., the improvement of scholarly communication by means of semantic technologies, this book proposes theories, formalisms and applications for opening up semantic publishing (in particular, scholarly articles and legal documents) to their users, by providing an effective interaction between documents and their related semantic and formal descriptions. Indeed, the main aim of this book is to increase the users’ comprehension of documents and to allow them to enrich their own documents, to automate the discovery of such documents by others, and to link to related resources such as scholarly articles, primary sources and raw data.

Silvio Peroni

2. The Digital Publishing Revolution

Abstract

In this Chapter I discuss the theories and technologies that take part in today’s publishing revolution, a.k.a. semantic publishing. In particular, I introduce some of the most important research works on my primary fields of interest, namely markup models and languages to enhance published documents (e.g., legislative documents) semantically, and ontologies/metadata schema to describe such documents. Finally, after introducing some significant research areas in the semantic publishing domain, I conclude the chapter by listing events (i.e., projects, workshops, journal issues, competitions) that have characterised the initial development of the discipline of semantic publishing.

Silvio Peroni

3. Markup Beyond the Trees

Abstract

The issue of enabling the coexistence of independent sets of annotations that may overlap on the same textual content has been and still is an important topic to address within the document markup community. In this chapter, I propose a solution to the problem of overlapping markup based on the use of Semantic Web technologies. In particular, I introduce EARMARK, the Extremely Annotational RDF Markup, a markup metalanguage and an OWL ontology that enable one to create documents with single hierarchies (as with XML) and also with multiple overlapping hierarchies whose textual content within the markup items belongs to some hierarchies but not to others. I show possible scenarios of application of EARMARK and, finally, I discuss how to use existing Semantic Web technologies, e.g., OWL DL reasoners, to assess the correctness properties typical of the structural markup, such as validity against a schema.

Silvio Peroni

4. Markup Semantics and Quality Evaluation of Legal Drafting

Abstract

In this chapter I introduce the issue of markup semantics, i.e., formal definitions of meanings of markup elements and textual ranges, in addition to the syntactical structure of a markup document. In particular, I propose an extension of EARMARK, the OWL-based markup metalanguage introduced in the previous chapter, based on a model, the Linguistic Act Ontology, to consider more general and comprehensive theories based on shared principles and well-grounded studies on linguistics, semiology and communication theory. After a detailed introduction to Akoma Ntoso, i.e., the primarily language I use in some of markup fragments of this chapter, I show the advantages of using LA together with EARMARK (i.e., LA-EARMARK) in three different use cases: to query documents that share the same implicit semantics; to assess the quality of legal drafting; and, finally, to provide a mapping between Akoma Ntoso and CEN MetaLex.

Silvio Peroni

5. The Semantic Publishing and Referencing Ontologies

Abstract

One of the main research areas in semantic publishing is the development of semantic models that fit the requirements of authors and publishers. Although several models and metadata schemas have been developed in the past, they do not fully comply with the vocabulary used by publishers or they are not adequate for describing specific topics (e.g., characterisation of bibliographic citations, definition of publishing roles, description of publishing workflows, etc.). In this chapter I introduce the Semantic Publishing and Referencing (SPAR) Ontologies, a suite of orthogonal and complementary OWL 2 DL ontology modules for the creation of comprehensive machine-readable RDF metadata for every aspect of semantic publishing and referencing. In particular, I show the characteristics and benefits of all the SPAR ontologies, and support the entire discussion with several examples of Turtle code describing a particular reference of the legal discipline, namely Casanovas et al.’s “OPJK and DILIGENT: ontology modelling in a distributed environment”.

Silvio Peroni

6. Semantic Data Interfaces for the Masses

Abstract

Extensive research has been done on models, theoretical approaches and development of tools to infer new information from data and ontologies. However, the Semantic Web will only be fully integrated with the everyday-Web only when it will be easily available and fully accessible to every Web users and not only to Semantic Web practitioners. The Semantic Publishing community urgently needs specific tools to assist non-experts in dealing with and publishing semantic data. In this chapter, I describe influential work and my personal contribution to this area. In addition, I discuss possible next steps to extend existing legislative editor by means of Semantic Web technologies, and highlight the key characteristics of semantically-enhanced legislative editors of the future.

Silvio Peroni

7. Conclusions

Abstract

In this chapter, I conclude the discussion of my work on Semantic Publishing. In particular, I summarise my own personal contributions in order to address one of the main issues of this field, i.e., the linking of a text to the formal representation of its meaning and thus the representation of its structure and of its argumentative discourse. In addition, I summarise my own contribution on the development of interfaces to hide the complexity of markup and ontology formalisms behind user-friendly views in order to help users of Semantic Publishing (e.g., scholars, publishers, archivists, librarians, etc.) that may have difficulties in interacting with Semantic Publishing technologies. Finally, I conclude the chapter introducing planned future works for all the languages, models and tools presented.

Silvio Peroni

Backmatter

Titel: Semantic Web Technologies and Legal Scholarly Publishing
verfasst von: Silvio Peroni
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-04777-5
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04776-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04777-5