Some Ontological Tools to Support Legal Regulatory Compliance, with a Case Study

Aldo Gangemi, Alessandra Prisco, Maria-Teresa Sagri, Geri Steve, Daniela Tiscornia

Abstract: The increasing development of legal ontologies seems to offer satisfactory solutions to legal knowledge formalization, which in past experiences lead to a limited exploitation of legal expert systems for practical and commercial use. The paper describes some ontology-based tools that enable legal knowledge formalization. Jurwordnet is an extension to the legal domain of the Italian version of EuroWordNet. It is a content description model for legal information and a lexical resource for accessing multilingual and heterogeneous information sources. Its concepts are organised according to a “Core Legal Ontology” (CLO), based on DOLCE+, an extension of the DOLCE foundational ontology. Jurwordnet and CLO are also used to represent the assessment of legal regulatory compliance across different legal systems or between norms and cases. An example is discussed concerning compliance between EC directives and national legislations.