The paper provides an OWL ontology for legal cases with an instantiation of the legal case Popov v. Hayashi. The ontology makes explicit the conceptual knowledge of the legal case domain, supports reasoning about the domain, and can be used to annotate the text of cases, which in turn can be used to populate the ontology. A populated ontology is a case base which can be used for information retrieval, information extraction, and case based reasoning. The ontology contains not only elements for indexing the case (e.g. the parties, jurisdiction, and date), but as well elements used to reason to a decision such as argument schemes and the components input to the schemes. We use the Protégé ontology editor and knowledge acquisition system, current guidelines for ontology development, and tools for visual and linguistic presentation of the ontology.

Click here for the Legal Case Ontology, which is described and applied in the article.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Henry Prakken.

• Steven Van Driel and Henry Prakken, Visualising the Argumentation Structure of an Expert Witness Report with Rationale (long)
• Tom Gordon, Analyzing Open Source License Compatibility Issues with Carneades (long)
• Martyn Lloyd-Kelly and Adam Wyner, Emotional Argumentation Schemes in Legal Cases (short)
• Burkhard Schafer, Say “cheese”: Natural Kinds, Deontic Logic, and European Court of Justice Decision C-210/89 (long)
• Anna Ronkainen, Mosong, a Fuzzy Logic Model of Trade Mark Similarity (long)
• Adam Wyner and Trevor Bench-Capon, Visualising Legal Case-based Reasoning Argumentation Schemes (long)

For more information, please see Dr. Wyner’s post announcing these papers, the workshop call for papers, or the JURIX 2010 Website.

• Steven Van Driel and Henry Prakken, Visualising the Argumentation Structure of an Expert Witness Report with Rationale (long)
• Tom Gordon, Analyzing Open Source License Compatibility Issues with Carneades (long)
• Martyn Lloyd-Kelly and Adam Wyner, Emotional Argumentation Schemes in Legal Cases (short)
• Burkhard Schafer, Say “cheese”: Natural Kinds, Deontic Logic, and European Court of Justice Decision C-210/89 (long)
• Anna Ronkainen, Mosong, a Fuzzy Logic Model of Trade Mark Similarity (long)
• Adam Wyner and Trevor Bench-Capon, Visualising Legal Case-based Reasoning Argumentation Schemes (long)

For more information, please see Dr. Wyner’s post announcing these papers, the workshop call for papers, or the JURIX 2010 Website.

Here is the workshop description:

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers can present their research on modelling legal cases and legal rules.

Papers are solicited that model a particular legal case or a small set of legal rules. Authors are free to choose the case or set of legal rules and analyse them according to the authors’ preferred model of representation; any theoretical discussion should be grounded in or exemplified by the case or rules at hand. Papers should make clear what are the particular distinctive features of their approach and why these features are useful in modelling the chosen case or rules. The workshop is an opportunity for authors to demonstrate the benefits of their approach and for group discussions to identify useful overlapping features as well as aspects to be further explored and developed.

For more information, please see the call for papers on Dr. Adam Wyner’s blog, Language Logic Law Software.

Disclosure: I am a member of the workshop’s Programme Committee.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

The submission deadline for tutorials, workshops and demonstration proposals is 19 September 2010.

Papers and proposals are invited on the following topics:

• “systems supporting lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation
• systems supporting the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation
• systems supporting the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases
• systems supporting police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations
• systems supporting public administration, in applying regulations and managing information
• systems for the retrieval of legal information
• systems supporting legal education
• systems for digital-rights management
• systems supporting the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods
• systems supporting alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line
• systems and methods to support regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes
• systems and method to support policies and legal issues for social networks
• theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence in the legal domain
• models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures
• models of legal inference and argumentation
• methods for verifying and validating legal knowledge systems
• methods and techniques for managing legal information in the semantic web
• methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts
• methods for modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Radboud G. F. Winkels.

[NOTE: This post was last updated on 1 September 2010 to add the extended full paper submission deadline.]

The paper was originally presented at LIT 2009: The 2nd Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology, held 28 April 2009 in Poznan, Poland.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

The authors of this study attempted to develop an advisory tool functioning in the scope of the Agricultural Tax Act. The focus of the authors in this study was on presenting the outcome of the efforts connected with building the ontology which would allow for representing individual cases, and dealing with cases not expressly regulated by law. This study will also outline the structure and concept of the system in question.

Click here for Dr. Hoekstra’s image of the ontology as applied to the Popov v. Hayashi case.

Many thanks to Dr. Wyner for posting this.

Click here for a preprint of the article. (Thanks to Dr. Wyner for posting this on his blog.)

Click here for the OWL ontology — called Legal Case Ontology version 9 — described in the article. (Thanks to Dr. Wyner for posting this on his blog.)

Click here for Dr. Hoekstra’s image of the ontology as applied to the Popov v. Hayashi case.

Here is the abstract of the article:

The paper provides an OWL ontology for legal cases with an instantiation of the legal case Popov v. Hayashi.  The ontology makes explicit the conceptual knowledge of the legal case domain, supports reasoning about the domain, and can be used to annotate the text of cases, which in turn can be used to populate the ontology.  A populated ontology is a case base which can be used for information retrieval, information extraction, and case based reasoning.  The ontology contains not only elements of indexing the case (e.g. the parties, jurisdiction, and date), but as well elements used to reason to a decision such as argument schemes and the components input to the schemes.  We use the Protege ontology editor and knowledge acquisition system, current guidelines for ontology development, and tools for visual and linguistic presentation of the ontology.

For full text of the article prior to publication, please contact the authors. Thanks to Dr. Wyner for the abstract and for posting the preprint.

[Post updated 29 April 2010 to link to the preprint.]

The post contains excerpts from the 2008 ESTRELLA User Report.

Dr. Wyner describes the main components of the project:

• The Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), a legal knowledge representation system, which “provides formalisms for representing concepts (‘ontologies’), inference rules, precedent cases and arguments”;
• The LKIF Core Ontology, a high-level general ontology for law; and
• MetaLex, an XML schema for legislation.

For more information, please see the entire post.