The legal informatics conference calendar has now been updated.
The calendar lists primarily scholarly conferences that focus on legal information systems, or that are known to welcome papers on legal information systems.
Click here for a list of events just added to the calendar.
If you know of events or other information that should be on the calendar but are not; or if you spot errors in the calendar, I’d be grateful if you would please share that information in the comments to this post.
Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has posted slides from his recent presentation entitled Textual Information Extraction and Ontologies for Legal Case-Based Reasoning, given 10 November 2010 at the ISKO UK panel Legal Know-How: Organization and Semantic Analysis, held at University College London. Here is the abstract:
This talk gives a brief overview of current developments and prospects in two related areas of the legal semantic web for legal cases – textual information extraction and ontologies. Textual information extraction is a process of automatically annotating and extracting textual information from the legal case base (precedents), thereby identifying elements such as participants, the roles the participants play, the factors which were considered in arriving at a decision, and so on. The information is valuable not only for search (to find applicable precedents), but also to populate an ontology for legal case-based reasoning. An ontology is a formal representation of key aspects of the knowledge of legal professionals with which we can reason (e.g. given an assertion that something is a legal case, we can infer other properties) and with respect to which we can write rules (e.g. reasoning using case factors to arrive at a legal decision). Since it is expensive to manually populate an ontology (meaning to read cases and input the data into the ontology), we use textual information extraction to automatically populate the ontology. We conclude with an appeal for open source, collaborative development of legal knowledge systems among partners in academia, industry, and government.
More information is available on Dr. Wyner’s blog, Language, Logic, Law, Software.
Click here for abstracts and some slides of the other panel presentations.
Professor Stephanie Davidson of the University of Illinois College of Law has published Way Beyond Legal Research: Understanding the Research Process of Legal Scholars, Law Library Journal, vol. 102, no. 4, pp. 561-579 (article no. 2010-32). Here is the abstract:
How do legal scholars seek, discover, and manage information while conducting scholarly research? While the methods of legal research have been well-covered in the literature, few studies have explored the habits and practices that legal scholars actually employ when doing scholarly research. For librarians who support scholarly work through collection development, instruction, and personalized services, understanding scholars’ research practices is vital. This article addresses gaps between models of legal research and actual research practices, and urges movement toward an empirically grounded understanding of the research habits of legal scholars in order to bridge some of those gaps.
Dr. Daniela Tiscornia of the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG/CNR) and Dr. Piercarlo Rossi of Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale Dipartimento di Studi per l’Impresa e il Territorio, have published ICT for networking research and education communities around Europe: Towards an ontology-based model for a collaborative platform of European law, European Journal of Law and Technology, vol. 1, no. 2 (2010). Here is the abstract:
This paper aims at providing an ontology based model for the creation of a collaborative platform to improve knowledge transfer between research outcomes and educational resources related to European law. The objective of the article is to examine the legal background and the methodological issues related to the modelling of knowledge of European law that constitute the backbone on which the technical aspects of the collaborative platform are built. The first part of the article highlights the role of ICT for the Europeanization of law, supporting the foundation of a European common legal discourse. The second describes the ontology based model, considering both theoretical issues and applicative solutions for the collaborative platform.
This article is based on a paper delivered at the 2010 annual conference of BILETA.
Dr. Elisabetta Fersini of the University of Milano-Bicocca’s Laboratory for Models in Decision Making and Data Analysis (MIND) has posted The JUMAS Experience: Extracting Knowledge From Judicial Multimedia Digital Libraries, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.
In this post, Dr. Fersini describes JUMAS (JUdicial MAnagement by digital libraries Semantics), an innovative platform, funded by the European Commission, for improving access to the content of digital audio and video recordings of court proceedings. Now being tested in courts in Italy and Poland, JUMAS is designed for use by judges and other court personnel. Dr. Fersini’s post describes each component of JUMAS:
This post should be of interest to those developing, managing, or administering court technology; the litigation technology community; scholars and consultants who work with video and audio of court proceedings; and all those interested in improving digital access to proceedings of legal tribunals.
