Call for papers: RuleML 2013: International Web Rule Symposium

The call for papers has been issued for RuleML 2013: International Web Rule Symposium, to be held 11-13 July 2013 in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Submission deadlines are 19 February for abstracts and 20 February for full papers.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Rules and automated reasoning
• Rule-based policies, reputation, and trust
• Rule-based event processing and reaction rules
• Rules and the web
• Fuzzy rules and uncertainty
• Logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning
• Non-classical logics and the web (e.g modal and epistemic logics)
• Hybrid methods for combining rules and statistical machine learning techniques (e.g., conditional random fields, PSL)
• Rule transformation, extraction, and learning
• Vocabularies, ontologies, and business rules
• Rule markup languages and rule interchange formats
• Rule-based distributed/multi-agent systems
• Rules, agents, and norms
• Rule-based communication, dialogue, and argumentation models
• Vocabularies and ontologies for pragmatic primitives (e.g. speech acts and deontic primitives)
• Pragmatic web reasoning and distributed rule inference / rule execution
• Rules in online market research and online marketing
• Applications of rule technologies in health care and life sciences
• Legal rules and legal reasoning
• Industrial applications of rules
• Controlled natural language for rule encoding (e.g. SBVR, ACE, CLCE)
• Standards activities related to rules
• General rule topics

For more details, please see the call.

LegalRuleML, a law-specific version of RuleML currently being developed by the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee, will be discussed at the conference, and papers about LegalRuleML are welcome. Click here for slides of a tutorial about LegalRuleML.

HT Dr. Roland Vogl

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Call for Papers: AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 28 February 2013 and full paper submission deadline of 15 May 2013 — has been issued for AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, to be held at a date to be determined, between 21 and 27 July 2013, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The workshop is being collocated with XXVI. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2013 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Knowledge Management
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Law and Robotics
• Complex Systems
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Theory
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Legal Culture
• Game Theory
• Computer Ethics
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Artificial Societies
• Rules and Standards
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Agreement technologies
• Legal Ontologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Governance
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Legal Thesauri
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Taxonomies
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Users’ studies
• Legal Knowledge Representation

For more details, please see the call.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

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

Palmirani et al., eds.: AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: Papers from AICOL III

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, Professor Dr. Ugo Pagallo, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas, and Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor, have edited a new book entitled AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems – Models and Ethical Challenges for Legal Systems, Legal Language and Legal Ontologies, Argumentation and Software Agents (Springer, 2012).

The book contains revised selected papers from International Workshop AICOL-III, Held as Part of the 25th IVR Congress, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, August 15-16, 2011.

HT Professor Palmirani

Van Opijnen on The European Legal Semantic Web

Marc van Opijnen of the The Netherlands Council for the Judiciary (Raad Voor de Rechtspraak) has posted the full text of his paper entitled The European Legal Semantic Web: Completed Building Blocks and Future Work, given last week at Journées européennes d’informatique 2012 = European Legal e-Access Conference.

Here is the abstract:

If constructed properly the European legal semantic web will improve access to legal information, stimulate innovative applications and legal services, and reinforce judicial and legal cooperation within Europe.

In this paper we will discuss why we still we do not have one-click answers on very basic legal questions, what building blocks are already in place and what still has to be done to have the European Legal Semantic Web really functioning.

We will start with some illustrations from legal practice to demonstrate the blessings of the semantic web, and the definition of some terminology (§ 1). Next, we will review the state of play regarding the most important building blocks for identifying legal sources (§ 2). In § 3 we will summarize the most necessary steps that have to be taken in the near future, both at European and national level, to make substantial headway. One of these steps might be the development of a European Legal Doctrine Identifier.

Some concluding remarks are made in § 4.

Among the resources discussed in the paper are:

• European case law identifier (ECLI)
• European legislation identifier (ELI)
• European legal doctrine identifier (ELDI)
• EUR-Lex
• CELEX

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

Legal Informatics Papers/Posters at ICEGOV 2012

Here are the legal informatics papers and posters (that I’ve been able to identify) to be presented at ICEGOV 2012: International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, being held 22-25 October 2012 at the University at Albany Center for Technology in Government, in Albany, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #icegov

[If you know of other legal informatics papers being given at the conference, please let us know about them in the comments to this post. For abstracts and full text, please contact the authors]:

• Vasiliy Burov, Evgeny Patarakin, Boris Yarmakhov: A Crowdsourcing Model for Public Consultations on Draft Laws
• Adriana Simeao Ferreira, Daniel Goncalves de Melo, Leondeniz Freitas: The Importance of Electronic Accessibility in Brazilian Juridical Electronic Process
• Josiah Heidt, Jackeline Solivan: Regulation Room: Moving Towards Civic Participation 2.0
• Kincho Law, Gloria Lau: REGNET: Regulatory Information Management, Compliance and Analysis
• Fabro Steibel: Designing Online Deliberation Using Web 2.0 Technologies: Drafting a Bill of Law on Internet Regulation in Brazil
• Siddharth Taduri, Gloria Lau, Kincho Law, Jay Kesan: A Patent System Ontology for Facilitating Retrieval of Patent Related Information

Archived Tweets and Resources from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012 at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

For blog posts and other resources related to the conference, please see the comments to this post.

October 7-9: LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, is being held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, in Ithaca, New York, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

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

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.