Boer and van Engers: Wetsanalyse met ontologieën en regels

Dr. Alexander Boer and Professor Dr. Tom van Engers have posted Wetsanalyse met ontologieën en regels, slides of a presentation given at the workshop Wetsanalyse met ontologie en regels, held in Spring 2012 at the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The presentation covers rules, norms, policy making, argumentation, the application of legal rules, and the analysis of non-compliance with law.

Leibniz Center Publishes All Dutch National Statutes and Regulations on Free Web in XML and RDF

The Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam announced yesterday that it has published all Dutch national statutes and regulations, free on the Web, in CEN MetaLex XML and RDF Linked Data, at The MetaLex Document Server.

According to Dr. Rinke Hoekstra, the database also includes “the body of regulations that govern the entire kingdom of The Netherlands (i.e. the former Dutch Antilles and Aruba).”

The technology underlying the service is explained in Dr. Hoekstra’s recent presentation, The MetaLex Document Server – Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data.

According to Dr. Hoekstra, a SPARQL endpoint for the Linked Data is available at http:doc.metalex.eu:8000/sparql .

For more information, please see the announcement, or contact Dr. Hoekstra.

HT @radboud and @rinkehoekstra.

Hoekstra on The MetaLex Document Server: Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data

Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law has posted slides of a presentation entitled The MetaLex Document Server: Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data.

The slides describe an approach in which regulations from the Wetten.nl site were processed to enable improved public access, re-use, and inclusion of data in the Semantic Web. Regulations were marked up in CEN MetaLex XML format; persistent, “Cool” URIs — generated from Juriconnect URNs — were added to enable version control and transparency; annotations were automatically added to the regulations and encoded in RDF as Linked Data; and the content was made available via a RESTful API.

For more information, please see the slides.

HT @RinkeHoekstra.

Winkels: What’s in an Interchange Standard for Legislative XML?

Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels of the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam has published What’s in an Interchange Standard for Legislative XML?, Jusletter IT, 22, Feb. 2011. Here is the abstract:

To make efficient and effective use of all sources of law electronically available in Europe, with all their different (XML) formats, we need an open interchange standard. Such a standard will enable public administrations to better serve their citizens and organisations, to link legal information from various levels of authority and different countries and languages. Moreover, it will enable companies active in the field of legal knowledge systems to design methods and tools that support a much larger market and it will protect customers of such companies from vendor lock-in. Such an interchange standard should obviously be jurisdiction and language independent. Furthermore, it should refrain from describing elements that are not specific for legal documents and it should refrain from describing elements that require interpretation of the content of these documents. Finally, the standard should allow for easy (external) linking of separate knowledge models of the content to the original sources of law. We claim that MetaLex meets these requirements best, and has been specifically designed to meet these requirements.

Ph.D. Position: Multi Agent Systems at Leibniz Center for Law

An announcement respecting a Ph.D. position in multiagent systems has been posted by the Leibniz Center for Law:

A PhD position on agent concepts in public administration at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The PhD student will work on the design methodology for multi-agent simulations, and address the interesting theoretical questions we have about agent role descriptions as design components in multi-agent simulation. The PhD student will also give input to a methodology for acquisition of legal knowledge from the text of the law.

Agent roles in general are identied with a set of abilities, and a set of susceptibilities to actions of others, and with goals, plans, and beliefs typical of that role. Law-based agent roles are a natural approach to knowledge acquisition from the sources of law. Law-based agent roles can be characterized by a set of powers and liabilities, duties and rights found in legal rules in thetext of the law. [...]

Job requirements

The candidate is supposed to write a PhD-thesis on the subject outlined below. He or she will be contracted as a PhD-student (AiO) conform the regulations of the University of Amsterdam.

The candidate for this position should have a master’s degree or equivalent. The candidate should be interested in the legal domain & in multi-agent systems. We are looking for someone with programming skills and a background in multi-agent systems, knowledge representation, and/or semantic web technology. [...]

For application instructions or for more information, please see the complete announcement.

New on VoxPopuLII: De Maat on Teaching the Computer to Read Legal Text

Emile de Maat of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam has posted Teaching the Computer to Read Legal Text, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Mr. de Maat describes the natural language processing techniques used at the Leibniz Center for Law to render legal texts capable of being processed by automated systems.

This post should be of interest to all those who publish or use digital legal information, or who develop egovernment or other information systems that incorporate digital legal information.

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.

Boer, van Engers, & Winkels on the Traceability of the Implementation of Legal Rules in Public Administration

Dr. Alexander Boer, Professor Dr. Tom van Engers, and Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels, all of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, presented a paper entitled Traceability of the Implementation of Legal Rules in Public Administration, at LIT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology, held 3 May 2010, in Berlin, Germany, in conjunction with BIS 2010: The 13th International Conference on Business Information Systems. Here is the abstract of the paper:

While isomorphism of knowledge representation has been recognized as important, particularly to maintenance in legal knowledge representation, the requirements of the maintenance process in general get less attention. Traceability from knowledge resources used in the organization to the sources of law used in their production is a central maintenance issue in administrative organizations. This paper explores a mediating knowledge representation for reconstruction of traces to sources of law and to implementation knowledge resources, that should be helpful for analysis of the impact of changing sources of law.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.

New Version of CEN Metalex Now Available

A new version of the CEN Metalex Workshop Agreement (dated 2009) is now available, per Professor Radboud Winkels of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam.

Metalex is an interchange format for legal XML schemas and document-type definitions.

For more information, and for links to other Metalex documents, please see the Metalex Website.

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.