Legal Ontologies in ICT and Law

Abstract

Re-usability is frequently declared as sine qua non feature of modern ontology engineering. Although thoroughly examined in general theory of knowledge management models the re-usability issue is still barely a declaration in the domain of legal ontologies. The similar situation also applies to statute-specific ontologies. Those knowledge modeling entities are well described especially as an opposition to the general application legal ontologies. Yet it is trivial to say that most of the developed legal ontologies so far are those generic ones. And this sole fact should not surprise as the very specialized knowledge models – usually harder to develop – are at the same time narrowed with their utility. Of course in terms of re-usability this simply means that this feature may be largely disabled in this kind of knowledge models. In this chapter we face both challenges, i.e. as an excuse for presentation of the most interesting in our opinion trends and works in the field we will demonstrate the practical approach to modeling copyright law case by re-using statute-specific ontologies.