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Types and Roles of Legal Ontologies

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Law and the Semantic Web

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3369))

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a number of basic types and roles of ontologies, and use them as a basis to analyze several legal ontologies in the AI and Law literature. We discuss some dimensions in which to distinguish types of ontologies, for example considering their level of structure. We propose five main roles of ontologies in general: (a) organize and structure information; (b) reasoning and problem solving; (c) se-mantic indexing and search; (d) semantics integration and interoperation; and (e) understanding the domain. We then discuss example of works that have exploited each of these roles in the AI and Law literature. Further, we discuss some of the consequences of using ontologies to play each of these roles in terms of the level of structure of the knowledge represented in the ontologies, the kinds of knowledge representation formalisms they use, and the reasoning methods they employ.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Knowledge System Ventures, 7707 Boeing Ave, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Andre Valente

Authors
  1. Andre Valente
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. iSOCO, P.O. Box, Spain

    V. Richard Benjamins

  2. Institute of Law and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

    Pompeu Casanovas

  3. Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam,  

    Joost Breuker

  4. Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology, Italian Research Council (ISTC-CNR), Via Nomentana 56, 00161, Rome, Italy

    Aldo Gangemi

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Valente, A. (2005). Types and Roles of Legal Ontologies. In: Benjamins, V.R., Casanovas, P., Breuker, J., Gangemi, A. (eds) Law and the Semantic Web. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3369. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32253-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-32253-5_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25063-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32253-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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