Title: Structured storage of legal precedents using a minimal deontic ontology, for computer assisted legal document querying

Authors: A.S. Abrahams, D.M. Eyers, J.M. Bacon

Addresses: Department of Business Information Technology, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0235, USA. ' University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK. ' University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK

Abstract: The automatic interpretation of case law, by computerised natural language processing algorithms, remains an elusive challenge. This paper proposes a less ambitious goal: human assisted semantic tagging of case law, using a basic deontic ontology, so that the structured document can be queried. Independent Resource Description Framework (RDF) named graphs are used to represent the legal case. An implementation of event calculus is used to make inferences over these named graphs. We employ our minimal deontic encoding to encode the significant aspects of a commercial case from the South African High Court.

Keywords: deontic ontology; legal document querying; semantic tags; RDF; resource description framework; named graphs; legal precedents; case law; document search; information retrieval.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2009.027754

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2009 Vol.4 No.3, pp.196 - 211

Received: 21 Jul 2008
Accepted: 09 Feb 2009

Published online: 10 Aug 2009 *

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