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Legal Technology - Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web

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Legal Technology - Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web
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Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web

By Dr. Adam Z. Wyner

Special to Law.com

June 8, 2009

Legal knowledge is largely expressed in written language, and legal professionals read and write to access, process and reason with the knowledge in texts. Although one can use information extraction to process text on a computer, the text remains a meaningless string of characters to the machine, without more –- such as the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web, an extension of the current World Wide Web, promises to make Web-based documents meaningful to both people and computers by changing how legal knowledge is represented, managed and reasoned with. This article focuses on ontologies, which are one of the means to complete the Semantic Web's design. It introduces some of the broad concepts of ontologies, indicates some of the sources of further information and tools, then provides a brief example of a legal ontology.

ONTOLOGIES

An ontology represents a common vocabulary and organization of information that explicitly, formally and generally specifies a conceptualization of a given domain. Ontologies are related to knowledge management (cf. Rusanow's "Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer ") and taxonomies (cf. Sherwin's article " Legal Taxonomies "). But an ontology is a more specific, explicit and formal representation of knowledge than provided by KM; and it is richer and more flexible than a taxonomy.

KM is concerned with how legal professionals share documents and use communication tools like blogs, wikis and e-mail, all of which are irrelevant to ontologies. Taxonomies do not appear to require an ontology’s logical facilities. In contrast to KM and taxonomies, legal ontologies have not been widely discussed among legal professionals, albeit they have long been discussed among researchers in artificial intelligence and law (cf. papers by Professor Trevor Bench-Capon ).

In making an ontology, one ...

Original URL
http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202431256007

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    • Mike Bennett Mike Bennett
      6 months ago


      Legal ontology would be fundamental to so many other areas of knowledge - for example financial securities are contracts, so it makes more sense in a financial ontology do say that a Tradable Security "isA" kind of Contract, but the term Contract should not be defined in isolation within the financial ontology and repeated for every other industry that also refers to it (e.g. insurance, eCommerce etc. etc.). It needs to be treated as a globally reusable term but it needs to have been defined by people with specialist legal knowledge.

      So where is the publicly reusable Legal Ontology? The article doesn't suggest one but describes what an ontology is and how legal folks could create one. Have I missed it?
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