Use and Reuse of Legal Ontologies in Knowledge Engineering and Information Management

In this article we present an overview of legal ontological modeling over a period of more than a decade. Most of the research reported concerns results from mid-size (European) projects aimed at the development of legal reasoning and information management tools and systems. In these projects we developed ontologies for several legal or regulation domains. However, the main thread of this article is provided by fundamental research performed by us or under our supervision (e.g. PhD theses by [1], [2], [3]), leading to more abstract legal ‘core’ ontologies and legal reasoning architectures. The major insights we have obtained from these experiences can be summarized as follows:

Legal sources contain and assume non-legal, common-sense based domain knowledge. Therefore, a legal core ontology should be rooted in highly abstract common sense concepts as a foundational ontology. This notion is worked out in the

LRI-Core ontology

, presented in this article.

What remains as typical legal knowledge to be modelled is normative and legal responsability knowledge. However, in this article we only summarize our work in this area, refering to [4] and to [5] on these issues.

As law and legal theory is focussed on questions of justification, legal (core) ontologies, e.g.

FOLaw

, are epistemological frameworks, describing legal reasoning, rather than legal ontologies, explaining knowledge resources.