Practical Aspects of Ontology Based Analysis and Reasoning for Law Information Represented in Textual Form
Legal domain is an important source of information and includes diverse law texts, court decisions, etc. which is dominated by documents collected in natural language. There is a great demand for the automatic analysis of the legal information in everyday work of lawyers and other people dealing with laws, for which the ontology based knowledge representation would be of a great advantage. Unfortunately, the current semantic and ontology based technologies cannot be easily applied for the analysis of legal texts due to a certain complexity of those. We present a strategy that allows different categories of tools, such as those for ontology creation, syntactical analysis of texts collected in natural language, and others to interoperate in order to achieve a common goal creation of domain specific ontologies and performing complex reasoning over them. A model that can be applied for the legal system knowledge representation is proposed and its implementation for the German Civil Law System in form of an ontology is discussed. The model allows the creation of a common ontology spanning over the knowledge contained in diverse laws, thus paving the way towards a wide adoption of semantic technologies by the experts in the law domain. Keywords Knowledge Representation; Law Texts; Ontology; RDF; Big Data; Rule Set.