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A legal case OWL ontology with an instantiation of Popov v. Hayashi

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Abstract

The paper provides an OWL ontology for legal cases with an instantiation of the legal case Popov v. Hayashi. The ontology makes explicit the conceptual knowledge of the legal case domain, supports reasoning about the domain, and can be used to annotate the text of cases, which in turn can be used to populate the ontology. A populated ontology is a case base which can be used for information retrieval, information extraction, and case based reasoning. The ontology contains not only elements for indexing the case (e.g. the parties, jurisdiction, and date), but as well elements used to reason to a decision such as argument schemes and the components input to the schemes. We use the Protégé ontology editor and knowledge acquisition system, current guidelines for ontology development, and tools for visual and linguistic presentation of the ontology.

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Notes

  1. A previous version of this paper was presented at the Workshop on Modeling Legal Cases, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, Barcelona, June 8, 2009 and appears in Wyner (2009). The OWL ontology which is discussed here is available upon request from the authors. The case citation is: Popov v. Hayashi, 2002 WL 31833731 (Cal.Superior Dec 18, 2002) (NO. 400545).

  2. See http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/.

  3. See http://protege.stanford.edu.

  4. See http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-manchester-syntax.

  5. See http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/.

  6. We have slightly “cleaned” the output of ACEView, which was not the key objective of our development. A graphic which represents the assertions and inferences of the ontological representation of this case is available upon request from the authors.

  7. See http://www.gate.ac.uk.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Ashton Building, Ashton Street, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK

    Adam Wyner

  2. AI Department, Faculty of Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Rinke Hoekstra

  3. Leibniz Center for Law, Faculty of Law, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Vendelstraat 8 (BG13a), Postbus 1030, 1000 BA, Amdsterdam, The Netherlands

    Rinke Hoekstra

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  1. Adam Wyner
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Correspondence to Adam Wyner.

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Wyner, A., Hoekstra, R. A legal case OWL ontology with an instantiation of Popov v. Hayashi . Artif Intell Law 20, 83–107 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-012-9119-6

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