legal informatics and legal concepts

Legal informatics and legal concepts

Giovanni Sartor, Enrico Francesconi

EUI - European university Institute of Florence/CIRSFID - University of BolognaITTIG-CNR – Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques

Italian National Research Council

Eurovoc Conference – 18-19 November 2010, Luxembourg

G. Sartor, E. Francesconi

Where is the law?

unwritten law (in thought and action)tacit-implicit law (social norms, customs, attitudes)spoken law (proverbs, parables, commandments, advice)

written law (in human-readable form)hand-written law (Hammurabi, the nine tables, Justinian’sdigest)printed law (official gazettes)

computable law (in machine-readable form)electronically stored law (in legal databases)electronically processed law (in computer programs andknowledge bases)

No substitution: dialectical integration/transmutation of thedifferent media

Unwritten law

Written law

Computable law


Legal informatics

A Definition:Theory and practice of computable law, i.e., ofcooperation/symbiosis between humans and machines in legalproblem-solving

Users/application domains:legislation (e-legislation), adjudication (e-justice),administration (e-government), politics (e-governance),research/doctrine, practice/professions, compliance/citizens


Areas of inquiry/development

Access to legal sources (legal documentation)Legal information systems (supporting legal activities)Legal drafting (drafting support, document assembly)Forensics (dealing with computer evidence)Legal training (e-learning)Modelling legal knowledge and reasoning (artificial intelligenceand law, computational argumentation)Legal determinations (knowledge-based systems)Legal planning/simulation (simulation, agent-based modellingof norm-governed behaviour, electronic societies)


Legal informatics: possibilities and risks


A time-line for legal informatics


Legal information systems


The epistemology of legal informatics

(From Tom Gordon)


Legal informatics and the law


Legal informatics and the web


Legal informatics in the semantic web


Concepts: Porphyry


Concepts as hierachies: Windscheid


Concepts as rules: Ross


Why are legal concepts important?

Cognitive role of conceptual structures in the law:summarise rules and their connectionscluster connected information and support relevant inferencesguide problem-solvingsupport generalisation and comparionguide analogiesprovide a shared framework for legal argumentationprovide a framework for intra- and trans-systemic trans-lingualcomparison


Concepts: Thesauri


Concepts: Semantic lexicons


Concepts: Multilingual ontologies


EU Legal Information Accessibility

Cross-Collection AccessibilityAccessing heterogeneousdata sources in adistributed environment

Cross-Language AccessibilityAccessing heterogeneousdata sources withoutlanguage barriers


Semantic Interoperability and Semantic Web

Semantic Interoperability can enhance both Cross-Languageand Cross-Collection AccessibilitySemantic interoperability can be obtained by implementing theSemantic Web concept

The Semantic WebThe process of embedding in theWorld-Wide Web information that is

understandable by humans

processed and understandable bymachines


Modelling Legal Concepts

Legal concepts modelling is the essential pre-condition for implementingthe Semantic Web concept in the legal domain

Knowledge organizing structures

Thesauri(Eurovoc, ETT, Eclas, Gemet, etc.)Semantic lexicons(WordNet, Syllabus, etc.)Legal Ontologies(LRI-Core, LKIF, CLO, Dalos, etc.)

Modelling strategy in a multilingual andmulticultural domain

Collaborating platform connectingLegal comparatistsTranslatorsOntology developers


Semantic Web to overcome language barriers

Bottom-up approachSemantic mark-up ofmultilingual documents

Top-down approachSemantic tools(thesauri, ontologies)to express the semantics ofusers’ information needs


Semantic Web to overcome fragmentation barriers

Quality of the retrievalin single collections is linked tothe availability of specificthesauri

in cross-collections is linked tothe interoperability amongthesauri

Eurovoc interoperability study based on

SKOS standard

Information Retrieval techniques


Challenges for an effective implementation

Knowledge acquisition bottleneck(Machine effort)

Time consuming editorial work(Human effort)

}Ex-post processing


Legislative Workflow Management. A way forward?

Semantics management at a very early stage ofthe law-making process

Authoring tools and CMS to manage semantics

in a standardized and multilingual environmentat the very early stage of the legal draftingprocess

}Ex-ante processing


Legislative Workflow Management. A way forward?

Semantics management at a very early stage ofthe law-making processAuthoring tools and CMS to manage semantics

in a standardized and multilingual environmentat the very early stage of the legal draftingprocess

}Ex-ante processing


legal informatics and legal concepts

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