The European Union is working towards harmonizing legislation across Europe, in order to improve cross-border interchange of legal information. This goal is supported for instance via standards such as the European Law Identifier and the European Case Law Identifier, which provide technical specifications for Web identifiers and suggestions for vocabularies to be used to describe metadata pertaining to legal documents in a machine readable format. Notably, these ECLI and ELI metadata standards adhere to the RDF data format which forms the (...) basis of Linked Data, and therefore have the potential to form a basis for a pan-European legal Knowledge Graph. Unfortunately, to date said specifications have only been partially adopted by EU member states. In this paper we describe a methodology to transform the existing legal information system used in Austria to such a legal knowledge graph covering different steps from modeling national specific aspects, to population, and finally the integration of legal data from other countries through linked data. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach by exemplifying practical use cases from legal information search, which are not possible in an automated fashion so far. (shrink)

This article describes the creation of a lightweight ontology of European Union (EU) criminal procedural rights in judicial cooperation. The ontology is intended to help legal practitioners understand the precise contextual meaning of terms as well as helping to inform the creation of a rule ontology of criminal procedural rights in judicial cooperation. In particular, we started from the problem that directives sometimes do not contain articles dedicated to definitions. This issue provided us with an opportunity to explore a phenomenon (...) typically neglected in the construction of domain-specific legal ontologies. Whether classical definitions are present or absent, laws and legal sources in general are typically peppered with a number of hidden definitions (in the sense that they are not clearly marked out as such) as well as incomplete definitions, which may nevertheless help legal practitioners (and legal reasoning systems) to reason on the basis of analogy or teleology. In this article we describe the theoretical basis for building an analogical lightweight ontology in the framework of an EU project called _CrossJustice_. We present our methodology for collecting the data, extracting the data fields and creating the ontology with WebProtégé, followed by our conclusions and ideas for future work. (shrink)

The first issue of _Artificial Intelligence and Law_ journal was published in 1992. This paper discusses several topics that relate more naturally to groups of papers than a single paper published in the journal: ontologies, reasoning about evidence, the various contributions of Douglas Walton, and the practical application of the techniques of AI and Law.