Van Engers & Winkels on The Leibniz Center for Law

Professor Dr. Tom van Engers and Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels, both of Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam, have published The Leibniz Center for Law, 7 SCRIPTed 402-405 (2010) (Issue No. 2). Here is a summary:

The Leibniz Center conducts research and provides education in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and law. In our research we focus on the development and application of techniques from AI to the field of law for the purposes of supporting legal practice and bringing new insights to legal theory. By building computational models of legal reasoning we work in the tradition of Leibniz, developing and using a formal “lingua universalis” and mechanic reasoning procedures providing us with reliable trustworthy results.

The Leibniz Center for Law has longstanding experience on legal ontologies, automatic legal reasoning, legal knowledge-based systems, (standard) languages for representing legal knowledge and information, user-friendly disclosure of legal data, and the application of ICT in education and legal practice. It plays an important role in the development of eGovernance on both national and international levels. The centre provides advice on change-management issues of knowledge-intensive legal processes and the improvement of knowledge-productivity in legal organisations.

The Leibniz Center for Law has participated in many national and international projects for applied research, in which companies, governments and universities cooperate (cf. CLIME, E-POWER, eCOURT, Legal Services Counter). It was the initiator of the CEN MetaLex initiative, an XML interchange-format and standard for legal documents. The Center was recently coordinating partner for two EU-financed projects: TRIAS and ESTRELLA. In TRIAS we developed modular electronic teaching material on e-government for civil servants using i.e. a semantic wiki. ESTRELLA was aimed at developing a formal legal knowledge interchange format (LKIF) for exchanging legal knowledge using semantic web technology. Currently we are running a national science foundation project called AGILE, targeted at the development of a design method, distributed service architecture, and support tools that enable organisations to better govern their legislation and regulation based information services within in a networked environment. Furthermore we are a partner in the FP7 project IMPACT on computational models of argumentation about policy issues. In this project we aim at applying natural language processing techniques (NLP) to multi-threaded dialogues about policies. We aim at (semi) automatic argument reconstruction, using both syntactic and semantic features of the participants’ natural language expressions. [footnotes omitted]

HT @radboud.

Wyner on The ESTRELLA Project

An overview of The ESTRELLA Project (The European project for Standardized Transparent Representations in order to Extend Legal Accessibility), a major legal informatics project based at the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law, and intended to create standards for European legal information systems, has been posted by Dr. Adam Wyner.

The post contains excerpts from the 2008 ESTRELLA User Report.

Dr. Wyner describes the main components of the project:

• The Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), a legal knowledge representation system, which “provides formalisms for representing concepts (‘ontologies’), inference rules, precedent cases and arguments”;
• The LKIF Core Ontology, a high-level general ontology for law; and
• MetaLex, an XML schema for legislation.

For more information, please see the entire post.

Ph.D. Student Position in Policy-Related Argument Reconstruction

Applications are invited for a position for a Ph.D. candidate to work on a research project in policy-related argument reconstruction and formalization, at The Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam. The candidate must have “a background in computational linguistics, or artificial intelligence, with an interest in argumentation. Experience with semantic web technology and practical IT skills are an advantage. Candidates should be proficient in English.”

The position is in connection with IMPACT (Improving Access to Text), “an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework programme. [IMPACT] will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. To support the analysis of policy proposals in an inclusive way which respects the interests of all stakeholders, research on tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet will be conducted. The key problem is translation from these sources in natural language to formal argumentation structures, which will be input for automatic reasoning.

“The candidate will be working on the design of an argument reconstruction tool, which uses a library of argumentation schemes to support the manual reconstruction of arguments from natural language texts. Moreover, an extension of existing XML formats for weblogs, such as RSS or Atom, will be developed which would enable future weblogs to mark up the structure of arguments in articles in such a way as to enable the arguments to be automatically aggregated, analysed and visualized, without human intervention. The extension may be based on the argument elements of the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF) developed previously by the partners in the ESTRELLA project (IST-2004-027655). The research will result in several publications, including a PhD thesis.”

For more information, please see the position announcement.

HT Dr. Radboud Winkels.

Wyner on Legal Ontologies

[NOTE: Updated on 29 December 2009 to correct the link to the article.]

Dr. Adam Wyner has published an interesting new article (at Law.com) about legal ontologies: Legal Ontologies Spin a Semantic Web.

Dr. Wyner’s article provides an introduction to ontologies and the OWL Web Ontology Language, explains the role of ontologies in the Semantic Web (i.e., a machine-readable Web), and discusses a hypothetical application of an ontology to case law.

Dr. Wyner then explores several practical issues in connection with applying a legal ontology to a collection of legal documents. First, he discusses choosing the level of specificity for the ontology, and suggests that, if multiple such levels must be accommodated, one could utilize multiple or integrated ontologies.

Second, Dr. Wyner discusses deciding who will construct the ontology and how; he recommends Web-based collaboration, as exemplified by Stanford University’s WebProtege system. That system is used to build the LKIF-Core Ontology, a major European legal ontology being developed within the ESTRELLA Project (European Project for Standardized Transparent Representations in Order to Extend Legal Accessibility) based at the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law.

Finally, Dr. Wyner discusses deciding who will mark up documents with terms from the ontology and how; he suggests that, in an educational environment, students could use Semantic MediaWikis, while in a publisher- or government-setting, employees could use “tool bars integrated with word processing software.” Dr. Wyner concludes by encouraging “an open-source, collaborative approach” to legal ontology development, as this should contribute meaningfully to the growth of the Semantic Web respecting legal information.