An OWL ontology library representing judicial interpretations

Abstract. The article introduces a formal model of legal knowledge that relies on the metadata contained in judicial documents, and JudO, a judicial ontology library that represents the interpretations performed by a judge when conducting legal reasoning towards the adjudication of a case. For the purposes of this application, judicial interpretation is intended in the restricted sense of the acts of judicial subsumption performed by a judge when considering a material instance (a token in Searle’s terminology), and assigning it to an abstract category (type). JudO is centred on a core ontology featuring some judicial ontology patterns, which take advantage of constructs introduced by OWL2, in order to provide appropriate legal semantics, while retaining a strong connection to source documents (i.e. fragments of legal texts). The final goal of the framework is to detect and model of jurisprudence-related information directly from the text, and to perform shallow reasoning on the resulting knowledge base. JudO also constitutes the basis for the application of argumentation patterns through reasoning on a set of rules, which represent the grounding of judicial interpretations in deontic and defeasible logics