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.
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Notes
- 1.
Linguistic Act Ontology: http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/semiotics.owl.
- 2.
RuleML homepage: http://ruleml.org.
- 3.
- 4.
Linguistic Act Ontology: http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/cp/owl/semiotics.owl.
- 5.
LA-EARMARK: http://essepuntato.it/2013/06/la-earmark.
- 6.
DBPedia “agent” resource: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Agent.
- 7.
The prefix deo refers to the Discourse Element Ontology (DEO), ontology for the characterisation of the major rhetorical elements of a document (e.g., a research article), such as the introduction part, the evaluation section, the conclusions and so on. It is available at http://purl.org/spar/deo.
- 8.
DBPedia homepage: http://dbpedia.org.
- 9.
The prefix akomantoso is associated to the minimal glue ontology within the XML document itself that connects markup structures to legal concepts according to the model explained in Barabucci et al. (2009).
- 10.
CEN MetaLex imposes that the content model of any element must be compliant with one of six main patterns: container, headed container, block, inline, milestone and meta. In addition to those content models, in CEN MetaLex there is and additional content model, called meta container, that requires a container to contain other meta containers or metas only.
- 11.
Architectural Forms allow designers to express semantic information about specific instances of an element or about all elements of a given type. This is possible by extending the set of attributes and by setting some of their values appropriately. Such information does not impact the basic processing and integrity of the document but makes it possible to describe meta-structures and to define the semantic role of the elements.
- 12.
CEN MetaLex Ontology: http://justinian.leibnizcenter.org/MetaLex/metalex-cen.owl.
- 13.
Some of the OWL classes I use in the following excerpt—i.e., ml:MContainerFragment and ml:MetaFragment—are not declared by the CEN MetaLex Ontology explicitly. However, I have decided to adopt such classes anyway for the sake of a better understandability of the example.
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Peroni, S. (2014). Markup Semantics and Quality Evaluation of Legal Drafting. In: Semantic Web Technologies and Legal Scholarly Publishing. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04777-5_4
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