SEMANTICS IN THE LEGAL DOMAIN
For any document created by anyone to communicate successfully to others, there must be a general consensus on the meanings of the contents of the document. As such, semantics depend on shared agreements amongst readers and creators of documents within a community/domain. An ontology provides a means of explicitly specifying the concepts within a community/domain, so that everyone within the community/domain has a common level of comprehension of these concepts upon which future knowledge exchange can proceed. Metadata on the other hand improves discovery of and access to the globally distributed information on the web, where each community/domain defines the semantics of metadata that address their needs. This presentation looks into the different ontologies in the legal domain, the motivations for using ontologies in legal information/knowledge systems, applications of some of the legal ontologies, a comparison of two such ontologies, as well as the metadata standards in the legal domain. It also looks into some tools for the legal ontologies/metadata.
Some Resources used: