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

Gordon, Governatori, & Rotolo on Requirements for Rule Interchange Languages in the Legal Domain

Prof. Dr. Thomas F. Gordon of Fraunhofer FOKUS and the Universität Potsdam Institute of Computer Science, Dr. Guido Governatori of the NICTA Queensland Research Laboratory, and Professor Antonino Rotolo of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» have published Rules and Norms: Requirements for Rule Interchange Languages in the Legal Domain, in Rule Interchange and Applications: Proceedings of RuleML 2009: The International RuleML Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications 282-296 (2009). RuleML 2009 was held 5-7 November 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Here is the abstract of the paper:

In this survey paper we summarize the requirements for rule interchange languages for applications in the legal domain and use these requirements to evaluate RuleML, SBVR, SWRL and RIF. We also present the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), a new rule interchange format developed specifically for applications in the legal domain.

Abstracts Available for LIT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology

Abstracts are available — see under “Monday, 3 May,” the entries for “LIT Workshop” on right screen, and hold cursor over each paper title to see its abstract, or display the page source — for the papers presented 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.

New Book: Law and Technology: Looking into the Future: Selected Essays

The following new legal informatics conference proceedings have been published: Law and Technology: Looking into the Future. Selected Essays (Meritxell Fernández-Barrera, Norberto Nuno Gomes de Andrade, Primavera de Filippi, Mario Viola de Azevedo Cunha, Giovanni Sartor, Pompeu Casanovas eds., 2010), ISBN: 9788883980602, 370 Pages. This volume contains papers originally presented at The Future of … Conference on Law and Technology, held 28-29 October 2008 at the European University Institute’s ONE-LEX Project.

Here is the abstract:

Perspective analysis are particularly important in the ICT-law domain, since ICTs have known the most accelerated development in the last decades, and the deepest social effects (determined the passage from the industrial society to the social formation labelled by us information, knowledge or network society), matched by pervasive legal change (from data protection, to intellectual property, to internet law). As ICT development and the ICT driven social evolution are still accelerating their steps, it is necessary that the law does not remain confined to current problems and established outcomes: it needs to look into the future scenarios for capturing the sense of dynamics now underway and for preparing adequate legal response.

Here are the legal informatics papers included in the volume, with links to full-text or abstracts where available:

• Pompeu Casanovas, Relational Law and the Next Generation of Web Services;
• Anton Geist, The Open Revolution: Using Citation Analysis to Improve Legal Text Retrieval;
• Giuseppe Contissa, Modelling European and Italian Tax Legislation with LKIF Language;
• Tobias Mahler, Tool-Supported Legal Risk Management: A Road Map.

For more information, including the complete table of contents, please see the book description.

HT Professor Enrico Francesconi.

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.