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Moving in the Time: An Ontology for Identifying Legal Resources

2008, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

The paper presents an application of the FRBR OO document model for defining an information ontology of legal resources that takes into account the dimension of time. FRBR-based paradigms are used within several existing projects in computer support of activities in the legal domain, but they are mostly oriented to bibliographic organization of documents without a real modeling of the peculiar characteristics of the legal domain. Also, all of them refer to the current version of the FRBR model, called FRBR ER. Yet, in these years the FRBR model is undergoing a major revision and a new version using an object-oriented approach is being developed. Thus we first have updated the model of legal resources to rely on the new object-oriented model, called FRBR OO. More importantly, consistency problems were corrected and the time dimension was introduced, which came very useful when considering the legal domain and dealing with legal resources. Therefore, while it is not in the scope of this paper to define an abstract model of the norms (e.g. obligations, permissions, etc.) or the representation of the norms (e.g. rules model), we rather focus our attention on the abstract description of the normative acts lifecycle and how it is possible to fill the gap between the rule modeling and the structure of the legal resources.

Moving in the Time: An Ontology for Identifying Legal Resources João Alberto de Oliveira Lima1, Monica Palmirani2, and Fabio Vitali3 1 Senate of Brazil 70165-900 Via N2, Anexo C, Brasília, Brazil [email protected] 2 CIRSFID - University of Bologna via Galliera 3, 40100 Bologna, Italy [email protected] 3 Department of Computer Science - University of Bologna Mura Anteo Zamboni 7, 40100 Bologna, Italy [email protected] Abstract. The paper presents an application of the FRBROO document model for defining an information ontology of legal resources that takes into account the dimension of time. FRBR-based paradigms are used within several existing projects in computer support of activities in the legal domain, but they are mostly oriented to bibliographic organization of documents without a real modeling of the peculiar characteristics of the legal domain. Also, all of them refer to the current version of the FRBR model, called FRBRER. Yet, in these years the FRBR model is undergoing a major revision and a new version using an object-oriented approach is being developed. Thus we first have updated the model of legal resources to rely on the new object-oriented model, called FRBROO. More importantly, consistency problems were corrected and the time dimension was introduced, which came very useful when considering the legal domain and dealing with legal resources. Therefore, while it is not in the scope of this paper to define an abstract model of the norms (e.g. obligations, permissions, etc.) or the representation of the norms (e.g. rules model), we rather focus our attention on the abstract description of the normative acts lifecycle and how it is possible to fill the gap between the rule modeling and the structure of the legal resources. Keywords: URI, FRBR, Ontology, temporal model. 1 Introduction The application of the FRBRER model in the organization of the various levels of abstraction of legal resources [11] has influenced many initiatives which deal with the organization of legal and legislative information such as the Akoma Ntoso [24], LexML Brasil, CEN Metalex [17] and Norme in Rete [1] projects. This paper revisits this theme and discusses the application of the new FRBROO model to legal resources. P. Casanovas et al. (Eds.): Computable Models of the Law, LNAI 4884, pp. 71–85, 2008. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008 72 J.A.O. Lima, M. Palmirani, and F. Vitali This discussion has as its main focus the new definitions of the FRBR Group 1 entities and the analysis of the inclusion of time dimension in the new FRBR vision. Several legal ontologies exist concerning the legal resources but mostly aimed at modeling the normative content [2] or the issues connected to the legal language [23]. On the other hand many different communities produced in the last ten years strong and robust international standards for describing the entities of the information resources (FRBR), sometimes oriented to manage the IPR issues (PREMIS) or the culture heritage resources (CIDOC CRM). Yet, we are currently missing an ontology to represent the legal resources identification, especially considering the dimension of time. There is in the state of the art a gap between the rule representation (e.g. knowledge rule base), the ontology on legal concepts and the identification of the legal resources. ESTRELLA project uses MetaLex/CEN standard for describing the XML structure of the Legal Resources, LKIF-core for defining the legal concepts in OWL, LKIF-rules for modeling the legal knowledge. Nevertheless there is not yet defined a common ontology, based on the information structure, for linking all these layers in considering also the dynamicity over the time. This paper starts to the URI naming convention of ESTRELLA project [17], and extends it for providing a preliminary step to a full modeling of legal knowledge framework. Section 2 of this paper, after a brief introduction to the FRBRER model, presents the definitions of Group 1 entities and lists some problems of the old model. Section 3 shows how the entities of the FRBRER model were mapped to new classes in the new FRBROO model and how the consistency problems were solved. Section 4, which is the main contribution of this paper, applies these new definitions to the legal domain and analyses the advantages and disadvantages. In section 5 we eventually produce our conclusions. 2 FRBRER Initially described as entity-relationship model to the organization of bibliographical records, [10], the FRBR1 is being revised by three working groups. One of these groups is working on the harmonization of the FRBR concepts with the CIDOC CRM2 ontology [9], generating a new version which uses the object oriented approach3. This integration process between the main reference models of library and museum communities initiated in 2003 and not yet finalized has been a “good opportunity to correct some semantic inconsistencies or inaccuracies in the formulation of 1 According to Doerr & Le Boeuf [5] the acronym FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records) “has now turned to a noun in its own right, used without particular intention to refer to ‘functionalities’, nor to ‘requirements’ but rather to the semantics of bibliographic records”. 2 According to Doerr & Le Boeuf [5] the acronym CIDOC CRM (Comité international de documentation Conceptual Reference Model) “is not particularly meaningful (CIDOC is affiliated to ICOM, the International Council of Museums). Just like FRBR, the acronym, rather meaningless by itself, has now turned to a noun in its own right.” 3 Like Doerr & Le Boeuf [5], this article used the acronyms FRBRER to refer to the original model which uses the technique entity relationship and the acronym FRBROO to the new model which uses the object orientation.