Palmirani, Paschke, et al.: Slides of LegalRuleML Tutorial at Jurix 2012

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of the University of Bologna has posted slides of the LegalRuleML Tutorial given at Jurix 2012 on 17 December 2012, in Amsterdam.

The slides include a general tutorial by Prof. Palmirani and colleagues, and a use case by Professor Dr. Adrian Paschke of Freie Universität Berlin entitled LegalRuleML for Legal Reasoning in Patent Law.

Click here for the program of the tutorial.

LegalRuleML is a markup language, based on RuleML, for modeling legal rules.

LegalRuleML is currently being developed by the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee, which is co-chaired by Professor Palmirani and Dr. Guido Governatori of NICTA.

JURIX 2012: 17-19 December

JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 17-19 December 2012, at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix2012

Click here for archived Twitter tweets (in .csv format) from the conference.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of workshops and tutorials.

HT @jurixfoundation

November 26 Call for Papers Deadline: Legal Resources from Text to Rules: Jurix Workshop

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 26 November 2012 — has been issued for the Jurix 2012 workshop entitled Legal Resources from Text to Rules, to be held 20 December 2012 in Amsterdam.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-20 December 2012 at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here are details of the workshop:

The time is ripe for investigating the connections between the representation of legal XML texts and their formalization as legal rules.

For years these two communities have pursued their goals separately, but now emerging XML-based standards oriented both to legal documents (Akoma Ntoso, CEN Metalex, national XML standards, etc.) and to legal rules (LKIF, RuleML, RIF, SWRL, LegalRuleML, etc.) justify the possibility to combine techniques and foster their concrete application in the society (compliance, eGov services, legislative drafting, policy making applications, digital legal libraries, etc.).

This workshop aims to examine the relationship between legal computable ontologies as bridges from legal concepts and their legal texts and legal rules (predicates). Hybrid platform where ontologies are used to support legal reasoning and to create bidirectional dialogues with legal knowledge bases are part within the workshop scope.

Questions we will try to address:

• Are the statuses of legal XML standards fixed? What are the next steps?
• Are legal rules autonomous or they need to link their evidences to the text for support?
• Are multiple interpretations of a legal text possible without affecting its representations as legal XML documents?
• What are the roles of the legal ontologies and of semantic web (especially Linked Data) technologies in this scenario?

Proponents: Monica Palmirani, Fabio Vitali, Enrico Francesconi, Tom van Engers, Radboud Winkels

Selected papers will be published in the AICOL IV volume by the end of 2013, after a double peer-review process.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Palmirani

Wyner et al.: An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and colleagues, will present a paper entitled An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws, at JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-19 December 2012 at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here is the abstract:

To make legal texts machine processable, the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translated to formal representations that can be automatically reasoned with. The paper considers the latter, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a form that can be reasoned with by a computer, sentences must be parsed and formally represented. The paper presents the state-of-the-art in automatic translation of law to a machine readable formal representation, provides corpora, outlines some key problems, and proposes tasks to address the problems.

This paper was produced as part of Project IMPACT.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Wyner, Bench-Capon, et al.: A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation

Dr. Adam Wyner, Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon, and colleagues, all of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, will present a paper entitled A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation, at JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-19 December 2012 at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here is the abstract:

Domain models have proven useful as the basis for the construction and evaluation of arguments to support deliberation about policy proposals. Using a model provides the means to systematically examine and understand the fine-grained objections that individuals might have about the policy. While in previous approaches, a justification for a policy proposal is presented for critique by the user, here, we reuse the domain model to invert the roles of the citizen and the government: a policy proposal is elicited from the citizen, and a software agent automatically and systematically critiques it relative to the model and the government’s point of view. Such an approach engages citizens in a critical dialogue about the policy actions, which may lead to a better understanding of the implications of their proposals and that of the government. A web-based tool that interactively leads users through the critique is presented.

This paper was produced as part of Project IMPACT.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

7 September: Extended CfP Deadline for JURIX 2012

The call for papers submission deadline for JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems has been extended to 7 September 2012.

Click here for the call for papers.

The conference will be held 17-19 December 2012 at the University of Amsterdam.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Rinke Hoekstra.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 1 September 2012 — has been issued for JURIX 2012: The 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 17-19 December 2012, at the University of Amsterdam, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Burkhard Schafer.

Proceedings Available for JURIX 2011 Conference

Proceedings have been published for JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held 14-16 December 2011, at the University of Vienna Centre for Legal Informatics.

The proceedings volume is: K. M. Atkinson (Ed.), Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2011: The Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference (IOS Press, 2011).

Abstracts for most papers appear to be available free of charge, whereas access to full text of papers appears to require a fee.

Slides Available for Katz and Bommarito: Network Analysis and Law: Introductory Tutorial

Slides have been posted for “Network Analysis and Law: Introductory Tutorial”, taught by Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law and Michael J. Bommarito II of Computational Legal Studies, on 13 December 2011 in Vienna, Austria, at JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Here is the outline of the tutorial:

Network Analysis: An Extended Primer

Advanced Network Science Topics

• Community Detection
• ERGM / P* Models
• Social Epidemiology

Network Analysis and Law

• Legal Elites
• Diffusion and Other Related Processes
• Legal Doctrine and Legal Rules

The Frontier of Network Analysis and Law

• Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks
• Dynamic Community Detection
• The Judicial Collaborative Filter (Judge Aided Info Retrieval)

For more information, please see the slides.

HT @computational.

JURIX 2011 Conference: December 14-16

JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, is being held 14-16 December 2011, at the University of Vienna Centre for Legal Informatics.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for workshops and tutorials associated with the conference.