Semantic model for legal resources: Annotation and reasoning over normative provisions

Issue title: Semantic Web for the Legal Domain

Guest editors: Pompeu Casanovas, Monica Palmirani, Silvio Peroni, Tom van Engers and Fabio Vitali

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Francesconi, Enrico

Affiliations: ITTIG-CNR, via de’ Barucci 20, Florence, Italy. E-mail: francesconi@ittig.cnr.it

Abstract: A Semantic Web approach for an advanced access to legislative documents is presented in terms of a model of normative provisions and related axioms. In particular, relations between provisions are identified and modeled by introducing patterns able to describe Hohfeldian legal fundamental relations. Moreover, a query-based approach able to deal with relations between provision specific instances is described. Examples of semantic annotation of legal textual resources using RDF/OWL standards, as well as advanced access and reasoning facilities over provisions using SPARQL, are shown. The main benefit of the approach is represented by the ability to keep the complexity of the problem within a description logic computational tractability.

Keywords: Legal Semantic Web, normative provisions, provision relations, Hohfeldian reasoning, Description Logic, OWL-DL

DOI: 10.3233/SW-140150

Journal: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 255-265, 2016