The two research areas of Legal Knowledge and the Semantic Web are very much interconnected. The legal domain is an appropriate field of study an application for Semantic Web researchers, as it uses and contributes to most of the topics that are relevant to the community. Given the complex interactions of legal actors, legal sources and legal processes, as well as the relevance and potential impact of decisions in social and political processes, law is actually providing challenging contexts and scenarios to reach groundbreaking research results. At the same time, Semantic Web formalisms and technologies provide a set of technical instruments which can be fruitfully adopted by legal experts to representing, interlinking, and reasoning upon the legal knowledge and several of its related aspects —such as provenance, security, data protection, privacy, and trust. In particular, Semantic Web technology might provide standard-based legal knowledge representations to enable the management and reuse of legal information across the Web.
Ontologies, knowledge extraction, and reasoning techniques have been studied by the Artificial Intelligence & Law community for years, but only loosely and sparsely connected with Semantic Web developments. Moreover, additional topics related to the semantics of legal interpretation intersect as well.
The aim of LK&SW-2016 is to study the challenges that the legal domain poses to Semantic Web research, and how Semantic Web technologies and formalisms can contribute to address these open issues. This way, we promote the use of legal knowledge for addressing Semantic Web research questions and, vice versa, to use Semantic Web technologies as reasoning tools to be implemented into the legal domain.
Duration: one full-day
Audience: Researchers, civil servant, public administrations, companies, standardization bodies.
Workshop format: Paper presentations and invited talks.
Acknowledgments
Connected with MIREL (MIning and Reasoning with Legal texts) projects Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 690974 http://www.mirelproject.eu/ )
Connected with BO-ECLI (Building On ECLI, eJustice Programme of the EU Commission No JUST/2014/JACC/AG/E-JUST/6962 http://bo-ecli.eu/)