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

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

Winkels et al. on Determining Authority of Dutch Case Law

Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels of the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam, Jelle De Ruyter of the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Law, and Henryk Kroese of the University of Amsterdam – Faculty of Natural Science, Mathematics and Information Science, have published Determining Authority of Dutch Case Law, in K. M. Atkinson (Ed.), Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2011: The Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference (pp. 103-112) (IOS Press, 2011). Here is the abstract:

In this paper we present the results of two studies to see whether the analysis of the network of citations between cases can be used as an indication of the relevance and authority in the Dutch legal system. Fowler e.a. [here and here] have shown such results for the US common law system, but given the different status of case law in continental tradition it is not clear whether this will hold in the Netherlands. Moreover, we introduce a way to validate the results using selections made by human experts for legal education. We discuss the results and conclude that network analysis of cases is a useful tool for legal research.

Wyner on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has posted Note on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects, on his blog, Language Logic Law Software.

The EU-funded Project IMPACT : Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis, was featured at the Workshop. Click here for more information about Project IMPACT.

Here is introductory information about the post:

On January 27th, 2012, I attended a workshop in Sheffield, United Kingdom on current FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling projects. This was an opportunity to hear from and meet participants in other projects, largely based in the United Kingdom. The information (somewhat augmented) about the workshop is below. My colleagues in the IMPACT Project, Professor Ann Macintosh and Neil Benn, presented our side of the story.

Aims

• To close the gap between the availability of cutting edge R & D in eGovernance and Policy Modelling and its take-up in local and central government. It will bring the new governance projects and those about to exploit their results into a collaborative environment.
• To link the projects currently creating the best practice of the future with initiatives seeking to share current best practice, thus assisting with “exploitation” of the new initiatives.
• To briefly assess how these initiatives may be of global benefit by examining how China may be encouraged to take a short cut to sustainable development and looking at joint approaches to China.

For more information, please see the complete post.

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.

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.

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.

De Maat & Winkels on Suggesting Model Fragments for Sentences in Dutch Law

Emile de Maat and Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels, both of The Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam, have published Suggesting Model Fragments for Sentences in Dutch Law , in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 19-28 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

A main issue in the field of artificial intelligence and law is the translation of source of law that are written in natural language into formal models of law. This article describes a step in that transformation: the creation of models for individual sentences in a source of law. The approach uses a natural language parse to analyse the sentence, and then translates the resulting parse tree to a formal model, using both generic and law-specific attributes.

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.