Structured storage of legal precedents using a minimal deontic ontology, for computer assisted legal document querying. (11th August 2009)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Abrahams, A.S.; Eyers, D.M.; Bacon, J.M.
• Is Part Of: International journal of metadata, semantics and ontologies. Volume 4:Number 3(2009)
• Page Start: 196
• Page End: 211
• Publication Date: 2009-08-11
• Subjects: deontic ontology -- legal document querying -- semantic tags -- RDF -- resource description framework -- named graphs -- legal precedents -- case law -- document search -- information retrieval; Metadata -- Periodicals; Semantic Web -- Periodicals; Ontologies (Information retrieval) -- Periodicals; Data structures (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Information theory -- Periodicals; 005.74
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-2621

Abstract

The automatic interpretation of case law, by computerised natural language processing algorithms, remains an elusive challenge. This paper proposes a less ambitious goal: human assisted semantic tagging of case law, using a basic deontic ontology, so that the structured document can be queried. Independent Resource Description Framework (RDF) named graphs are used to represent the legal case. An implementation of event calculus is used to make inferences over these named graphs. We employ our minimal deontic encoding to encode the significant aspects of a commercial case from the South African High Court.