Emerald: Integrated Legal Modelling Framework
Förhécz András <>
Multilogic Kft
Strausz György Dr. <>
BME Méréstechnika és Információs Rendszerek Tsz.
Kőrösi Gábor <>
Multilogic Kft
Szőke Ákos <>
Multilogic Kft.
Introduction
The complexity and increasing number of regulations result in significant tasks and expenditures for both the civilian population and organizations. Supporting to become acquainted with the legal surroundings and to obey the law are of overriding importance. With the development of artificial intelligence (AI) – especially knowledge modelling and reasoning – makes the utilization of software systems possible to support the process of legislation and dispensation of justice with the development of legal knowledge models. There can be wide-ranging applications of these knowledge models: impact analysis of changing regulations, finding inconsistencies among regulations, and supplying the civil population with knowledge-based legal advisory portals.
Objectives
Our goal is to develop an integrated legal modelling framework, named Emerald, that can support building legal knowledge models. The framework’s aim is to provide a more efficient approach to modelling than the common rule-based systems by utilization of the recently emerged Semantic Web technologies. Besides creating a new environment we provide methodology support to it and real-life examples to demonstrate the usefulness of the framework.
Novel Services
With the utilization of state-of-the-art technologies, Emerald can provide novel services comparing to the common legal expert systems. An Emerald knowledge base, which constitutes the core element of the system, is based on ontologies that describe formal description of domain specific terminology. The knowledge base characterise the legal regulations with formal rules which is a usual approach in expert systems. However, this ontology-based approach can express all the legal notions and relations in a unified manner and the explicit presence of terminology helps to link in external data sources also easily.
An important characteristic of Emerald is the ability to establish a connection between the original source of legal regulations and their ontology-based formal descriptions. This relationship can be accomplished by an inherent integrated document management subsystem. This subsystem can produce an annotated version of source documents and provide semantic query functions.
Applied Knowledge Representation
The applied knowledge representation relies on the widely used OWL2 ontology language. This language involves one of the most expressive decidable description logics known yet. The Emerald rule language uses the classes and properties that are declared in the ontology as predicates, and the arguments of these predicates are either entities of the ontology or local variables.
An important field of application can be the evaluation of legal problems, where the reasoning should be carried out on (partially) available information. An essential service of Emerald is the ability to gain the relevant information from users through automatically generated question forms to complete the knowledge base with the necessary additional information during finding the answer.
Conclusion
The applied wide-spread technologies and standards ensure that the constructed legal models and knowledge bases can be used in the EU and other countries. Based on our preliminary real-life experiments, we believe that the proposed approach can provide significant value for both the civilian population and organizations.