A FRAMEWORK FOR SEMANTICALLY RICH LEGAL DOCUMENTS AND APPLICATIONS

John Murphy, Robert Steele

2008

Abstract

This paper describes the use of Semantic Web technologies for enriching legal documents within a framework that provides a base for the development of applications to reduce problems experienced by legal practitioners in the administration of justice. The framework builds upon the terms and concepts found within structured information sources in the document centric legal domain. Contributions of this paper include (1) the description of a bottom-up ontology development approach utilizing the terms and structures within legal documents; (2) an explanation of how this legal knowledge can be captured from existing document resources and represented using Semantic Web languages; (3) an analysis of the comparative benefits of this bottom-up approach versus existing top-down approaches and (4) concrete examples of how to represent such legal knowledge using OWL/ RDF. We argue such bottom-up legal ontology development grounded in the terms and concepts found in existing legal resources will support direct and easier annotation of resources with the semantics of legal concepts and hence provide a base for the easier development of a legal applications layer.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Murphy J. and Steele R. (2008). A FRAMEWORK FOR SEMANTICALLY RICH LEGAL DOCUMENTS AND APPLICATIONS . In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: WEBIST, ISBN 978-989-8111-27-2, pages 193-200. DOI: 10.5220/0001523601930200

in Bibtex Style

@conference{webist08,
author={John Murphy and Robert Steele},
title={A FRAMEWORK FOR SEMANTICALLY RICH LEGAL DOCUMENTS AND APPLICATIONS},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: WEBIST,},
year={2008},
pages={193-200},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0001523601930200},
isbn={978-989-8111-27-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 2: WEBIST,
TI - A FRAMEWORK FOR SEMANTICALLY RICH LEGAL DOCUMENTS AND APPLICATIONS
SN - 978-989-8111-27-2
AU - Murphy J.
AU - Steele R.
PY - 2008
SP - 193
EP - 200
DO - 10.5220/0001523601930200