Haydée Di Iorio et al. on Ontologies, ICTs and Law: The International Ontojuris Project

Professor Dr. Ana Haydée Di Iorio, Bibiana Beatriz Luz Clara, Esq., and Professor Dr. Roberto Giordano Leren, all of Universidad FASTA Facultad de Ingeniería, have published Ontologies, ICTs and Law: The International Ontojuris Project, 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 95-102 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

This article presents the experience of the International Ontojuris Project, modeled and developed to search and retrieve multilingual legal information based on ontologies and on the Universal Networking Language (UNL). It also presents the issue of multilingual information management, the importance of data processing from the semantic point of view and the possibility of semantic interoperability between systems, basically on Web search engines.

Bueno et al. on The Ontojuris Project: A Multilingual Legal Document Search System Based on a Graphical Ontology Editor

Tânia C. D. Bueno, of instituto i3G, Dr. Hugo C. Hoeschl of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento and instituto i3G, and César R. K. Stradiotto of instituto i3G, presented a paper entitled Ontojuris Project: A Multilingual Legal Document Search System Based on a Graphical Ontology Editor, 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:

The Ontojuris project consists of a multilingual system for legal information retrieval (IR) associated with an ontology editor. The system accepts queries in one language, and allows IR based on similarity of documents, written in one of several languages. The multilingual ontology editor works with the concept of Universal Words (UW´s). The UW´s are universal representations of things and objects, and it is developed inside the Universal Networking Language Project (UNL), allowing query expansion in a multilingual way. Query expansion can improve the searching process required by user, including additional terms which have similar meaning to the original query. In this study, we proposed a new expansion method which is based on domain ontology and UW´s, to achieve better performance for a multilingual IR. So, the Ontojuris project aims to facilitate access to information on legislation in the area of Intellectual Property Law, Consumer Rights and Electronic Law in the consortium formed by researches in Brazil, Chile, Spain and Argentina.

The authors appear to have presented a related paper, entitled Ontology Graphical Editor for Multilingual Document Search System, at FQAS 2009: The 8th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, held 26-28 October 2009 in Roskilde, Denmark. Here is the abstract of the FQAS 2009 paper:

These research studies compare two methods for ontology creation and their corresponding tools. The main objective of this work is the building of a graphical editor for ontology construction, based on software usability criteria. This comparison shows which methods used in previous tools will remains in the new editor, and what new tools can be developed for enhancing the ontology management made using the old one.

The use of graphics and diagrams helps in the discovery of new knowledge, from information received from various sources, being the Internet or databases. This new type of editor improves the visualization of relations between the terms of ontologies and thereby improves the efficiency of its construction for commercial application systems. In addition, this form of information representation, based on these diagrams, will allow information systems based on ontologies to identify – automatically – concepts, hidden elements, the flow time between the events of cause and consequences and the meaning of relations between the captured information.

The Ontojuris project has the purpose given above, and it is described on this paper. The project consists of a multilingual information system for legal information retrieval associated with an ontology editor, called Knowledge Engineering Suite. The system accepts queries in one language, and allows information retrieval based on similarity of documents, written in one of several languages. The multilingual ontology editor works with the concept of Universal Words (UW’s). The UWs are universal representations of things and objects, and it is developed inside the UNL Project (UNL being an acronym for Universal Networking Language) and allows the query expansion in a multilingual way. Query expansion can improve searching process, required by user, by including additional terms which have similar meaning to the original query. In this study, we proposed a new expansion method which is based on domain ontology and UWs, to achieve better performance for a multilingual information retrieval. So, the Ontojuris project aims to facilitate access to information on legislation in the area of Intellectual Property Law, Consumer Rights and Electronic Law in the consortium formed by researches in Brazil, Chile, Spain and Argentina.

Click here for the full text of the FQAS 2009 paper on SpringerLink (access requires purchase or subscription).

For the full text of the LIT 2010 paper, please contact the authors.