The Lois Project: Lexical Ontologies for Legal Information Sharing

Abstract. Semantic metadata are expected to support search engines for legal information retrieval, providing legal knowledge to include into their search strate-gies. In a wide meaning, semantic metadata are ’all kind of information describing a resource’; this paper focuses on a strict notion of semantic metadata, meaning ’information about content’, i.e. ’what the resource is about’. In general standard frameworks such as Dublin Core, this kind of information is expressed by the meta-data ’Subject’, which carries at least one preferred term from lexical resources as controlled vocabularies or encoding schemes, which are usually defined as hierarchies of terms, usually lacking a purely defined semantics. Starting from an European project recently concluded, this paper presents a methodology for building a multi-lingual semantic lexicon for law, featuring lexically and legally grounded conceptual representations, to be used either as a source of semantic metadata and as an external tool for cross lingual retrieval. The role played by semantic resources, such as lexical and formal ontologies in improving real access to legal information is analysed and the problems encountered in the methodological steps are outlined