Tiscornia and Fernández-Barrera on Knowing the Law as a Prerequisite to Participative eGovernment: The Role of Semantic Technologies

Dr. Daniela Tiscornia of the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG/CNR) and Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS, have published Knowing the Law as a Prerequisite to Participative eGovernment: The Role of Semantic Technologies (2012).

The article is published in Yannis Charalabidis and Sotirios Koussouris (Eds.), Empowering Open and Collaborative Governance: Technologies and Methods for Online Citizen Engagement in Public Policy Making (part 2, pp. 119-138) (Springer, 2012). Here is the abstract:

Active participation of EU citizens to their national and local decision-making process can only occur once they have a full knowledge of the transnational and national regulatory and institutional context. Despite their actual right to access legal documents, several barriers still prevent citizen against getting a true understanding of the effects brought about by normative changes and regulatory innovations. Linguistic and conceptual complexity of the legal domain is combined with technical barriers, and the availability of satisfactory, complete and reliable information services for legal experts and non-experts has still to come. This chapter focuses on the role ICT and, more specifically, semantic technologies play in providing powerful tools for bridging the gap between the two layers, that is, the formal and the conceptual aspects of legal knowledge, by guaranteeing not only formal access to the sources of the law but substantial knowledge of its content as well.

Thanks to Dr. Fernández-Barrera for granting permission to post this abstract.

Anderson on Adding Citizen Engagement Functions to Free Access to Law Sites

Kerry Anderson of the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII) has posted Social Wrapper for the Law: An Introduction, at the AfricanLII Blog.

In this post, Ms. Anderson calls for the addition of citizen-engagement functions to the many free-access-to-law sites now available in Africa. She writes:

My initial sense is that we a) need to allow users to contribute feedback on all aspects of the case law and legislation available; b) allow the user to select how structured or unstructured that feedback should be; c) identify who our users might be; d) have a mechanism for collating the resulting feedback in a format which an academic researcher would be able to tailor into a format which can be presented to governing bodies; e) expand our network so we have the right people presenting the information to the right governing bodies.

As examples of citizen-engagement functionality, Ms. Anderson cites “initiatives in the US, in Morocco and in Egypt that are fostering crowd-sourcing for constitutional reform,” discussed recently by Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera at VoxPopuLII; and POPVOX, Dr. Joshua Tauberer and Marci Harris‘s legislative citizen-engagement site which “allows users to choose to support or oppose new bills and share the information with Congress.”

Ms. Anderson invites readers “to contribute links to any other such initiatives of which you know.” (Click here to register at AfricanLII for purposes of commenting on Ms. Anderson’s post.)

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @Andrew_Rens.

Fernández-Barrera on User-Generated Knowledge Through Legal Ontologies

Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS has successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, entitled User-generated knowledge through legal ontologies: how to bring the law into the Semantic Web 2.0, at the European University Institute Department of Law, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID.

Here is the abstract:

This thesis presents a study of the epistemological and cognitive assumptions which currently underlie knowledge acquisition for legal ontology engineering. The hypothesis is that such assumptions might have a qualitative effect on the final ontological-terminological resources and therefore on the performance of the systems which use them.The first part of the thesis presents the state of the art in legal ontology engineering (the computational concept of ontology, a review of available legal ontologies and modelling methodologies). The second part of the thesis shows that currently knowledge acquisition in legal ontology learning is limited to very concrete legal genres, namely, legislation, case law and legal doctrine. The third part presents a case study in which two different legal genres are used for building a consumer law ontology: a traditional legal genre, Italian consumer regulation, and a Web 2.0 genre, namely an online corpus of citizens‟ queries regarding consumer justice. Results proof the impact of legal genre variation on the construction of the domain ontology. Thus main findings suggest that Web 2.0 corpora are a rich source for the construction of ontological resources, and at the same time these new types of ontological resources might be useful in e-government applications aimed at increasing online communication with citizens.

Some parts of the thesis are summarized in Dr. Fernández-Barrera’s recent VoxPopuLII post, entitled Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?

For the full text of the thesis, please contact Dr. Fernández-Barrera.

Legal Informatics Papers at STOG 2012: Workshop on Semantic Technologies for Open Government

Several legal informatics papers were presented at STOG 2011: Workshop on Semantic Technologies for Open Government, held 28 October 2011 in Florence, Italy, in conjunction with the e-Challenges 2011 conference:

Here is the workshop program:

• Marta Poblet, UAB Institute of Law and Technology, Spain: Mobile Phones, Images, Hashtags: Mobile Activism and Public Participation;
• Antoni Roig, IDT (Institute of Law And Technology), Spain: Towards a Global eDiscovery Standard;
• Pompeu Casanovas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain: Dialogue and data. A relational model for governance and law;
• Jorge Gonzalez-Conejero, Institute of Law and Technology, Spain: Online Mediation Consumer Tools: MediWeb and MediApp;
• Meritxell Fernández-Barrera, Cersa, CNRS-Paris2, France: A contextualised ontology of the consumer law: bridging specialised and common-sense knowledge through contextual schemes;
• Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, Italy: Beyond Information Toward Open Data;
• Enrico Francesconi, ITTIG-CNR, Italy: Thesaurus Mapping for Promoting Semantic Interoperability of European Public Services;
• Tommaso Agnoloni, CNR , Italy: Towards a European Legal Data Cloud.

For abstracts or full text of papers, please contact the authors.

New on VoxPopuLII: Fernández-Barrera on Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?

Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS has posted Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Dr. Fernández-Barrera describes new, innovative methods of analyzing very large quantities of law-related user-generated content.

In two recent studies described in the post, Dr. Fernández-Barrera and colleagues analyzed thousands of consumer law queries and complaints submitted by citizens to consumer protection agencies in Spain and Italy. Using a combination of automated text extraction techniques and expert input from lawyers, the researchers mapped the citizens’ lay terminology to formal legal terms. The technical legal language was expressed in legal ontologies — the Mediation Core Ontology and the Consumer Mediation Ontology — or in statutes: the Italian Consumer Code. The results of this research give us new insights about citizens’ knowledge of consumer law, and about the relationships between formal legal language and the way law is expressed in lay language.

Dr. Fernández-Barrera then describes her recent research into methods for making legal semantic analysis of user-generated content scalable. In studies of citizens’ online queries about consumer law and noise-nuisance complaints, she and her colleagues found that by focusing on language patterns involving emotions, events, and “stereotypical situations appearing in the description of legal cases by citizens,” automated techniques alone could successfully analyze very large quantities of user-generated content. Dr. Fernández-Barrera concludes by reflecting on the ethical dimensions of governments’ use of citizen comments in law- and policy making.

This post should be of interest to policy makers, the e-government and Government 2.0 communities, the Web 2.0 community, those who study legal language, and developers of legal information systems.

Sartor et al. on Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies

Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies (Springer 2011), a collection of scholarly articles on legal ontologies, has been published.

The volume is edited by Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas of the Institute of Law & Technology (IDT) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Maria Angela Biasiotti of ITTIG/CNR, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of the European University Institute Department of Law.

This is the first volume in Springer’s new Law, Governance, and Technology Series, edited by Professors Casanovas and Sartor.

Some of the articles in this volume are based on papers originally presented at the Workshop on Approaches to Legal Ontologies, held 9-10 December 2008, at European University Institute Department of Law, in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

Here are the contents:

1. Introduction: Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engineering: Experiences and Future Directions / Pompeu Casanovas, Giovanni Sartor, Maria Angela Biasiotti, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
2. The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies / Meritxell Fernández-Barrera and Giovanni Sartor
3. Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective / Pompeu Casanovas, Núria Casellas, and Joan-Josep Vallbé
4. A Cognitive Science Perspective on Legal Ontologies / Joost Breuker and Rinke Hoekstra
5. Social Ontology and Documentality / Maurizio Ferraris
6. The Case-Based Reasoning Approach: Ontologies for Analogical Legal Argument / Kevin D. Ashley
7. A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks / Pierre Mazzega, Danièle Bourcier, Paul Bourgine, Nadia Nadah, and Romain Boulet
8. The Multi-Layered Legal Information Perspective / Guido Boella and PierCarlo Rossi
9. Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective / Maria Angela Biasiotti and Daniela Tiscornia
10. A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling / Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone, and Fabio Vitali
11. From Thesaurus Towards Ontologies in Large Legal Databases / Ángel Sancho Ferrer, Carlos Fernández Hernández, and José Manuel Mateo Rivero
12. The Computational Ontology Perspective: Design Patterns for Web Ontologies / Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti, and Eva Blomqvist
13. A Learning Approach for Knowledge Acquisition in the Legal Domain / Enrico Francesconi
14. Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective / Roberta Ferrario, Nicola Guarino, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
15. Legal Multimedia Ontologies and Semantic Annotation
    for Search and Retrieval / Jorge González-Conejero