Visualising Legal Meaning in
Legal Informatics
DatAMSS 2014, Druskininkai, Lithuania, 4-6.12.2014
6th International Workshop Data Analysis Methods for Software Systems
Friedrich LACHMAYER Vienna and University of Innsbruck
www.legalvisualization.com
Vytautas ČYRAS Vilnius University
Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics
Kristina LAPIN Vilnius University
Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics
1. Motivation:
why visualization
of law?
2
Communicating legal contents
from the human to the machine
• Transition from text culture to machine culture in law
• Semantic modeling [Paradauskas, Nemuraitė 2008 “Semantic models of databases”, in Lithuanian]
3
“Multiphase transformation”
1. Gap “law computer” is too wide.
2. Therefore several stages.
3. “Multiarch bridge”
4
Legal visualization
• Not data visualization
• Not information visualization [Card 2008]
• A kind of knowledge visualization
5
“Symbolization” as visualization
1. The language of law = metaphors
2. Logical diagrams
6
Privalomybė
Esamybė
Law
Is Ought
part-of part-of
Law as a whole
7
Is does not imply Ought
• Fact A does not imply Norm(A)
• Neither is implied: Obligatory A, Permitted A, Forbidden A
• Causation does not imply imputation
– Causation: if A then B
– Imputation: if A then Ought B
8
B cause A
B Ought A
Visualizing the meaning (semantics)
9
Guarino, Oberle, Staab 2009
“What is an Ontology?”
To what extent does UML
visualize meaning?
2. Visualization as
tertium comparationis
10
Tertium comparationis
• Latin – the third part of the comparison
• Quality that two things that are being
compared have in common
11
A B
tertium comparationis
4 apples 4 pears
Number 4
Tertium communicationis
• Intermediate formats, e.g. XML Schema
• Aim: document type definition for
communication humans/machines
12
Two directions
13
Two ways of producing
tertium comparationis
14
Text-visualization correspondence
15
[Fill, Karagiannis 2013]
[Atk
inson, K
ühn
e 2
00
3]
Visual products
• Different representations of norms
• Etc.
16
