Welcome to the pages of the Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam. As an interdisciplinary research group, we develop intelligent technology to support legal practice both in the private and in the public sector. We apply Artificial Intelligence techniques to problems in legal theory, legal knowledge management and the field of Law in general. In this capacity, we participate in many (inter)national research initiatives and maintain strong ties to the international research community and government agencies.
We have longstanding experience in the development of legal ontologies, automatic legal reasoning and legal knowledge-based systems, (standard) languages for representing legal knowledge and information, user-friendly disclosure of legal data, and the application of information technology in education and legal practice. As an academic partner, the Leibniz Center provides advice on change-management issues of knowledge-intensive legal processes and the improvement of knowledge-productivity in legal organisations.
The Leibniz Center for Law has its roots in the former department of Computer Science & Law (est. 1989) of the Law Faculty of the University of Amsterdam, and currently houses about 15 researchers.
For more background on the Leibniz Center, see our general information pages, and have a look at current projects.
Tom van Engers reageert in de NRC van 12 juli op een opiniestuk van de hand van Frank Kuitenbrouwer (Opiniepagina, 8 juli) waarin deze de wijziging op de Bekendmakingswet bekritiseert.
Lees hier het stuk van Frank Kuitenbrouwer, en hier het stuk van Tom van Engers.
July 13th, 2008
ISMICK 2008 invites authors to submit original papers on research, practice and experience in the field of knowledge management, and in particular related to knowledge based innovation in and across public and private organizations. Academic as well as business practice and consultancy experience papers are welcome. Papers are to be electronically submitted through the ISMICK 2008 website at www.ismick.org. The deadline for submission is 20 June 2008 July 15 2008.
Additional information can be found at http://www.ismick.org.
March 18th, 2008
The AGILE project - Advanced Governance of Information services through Legal Engineering - is targeted at the development of a design method, distributed service architecture and support tools that enable organisations to better govern their legislation and regulation based information services within in a networked environment.
Legal pluralism, the need for integrated services and specific requirements for a knowledge representation suited for expressing legal knowledge and legal reasoning demand a specific service architecture. The project will use knowledge representation technologies developed within the semantic web community as a starting point, and extends those with elements specific for the legal domain. Furthermore, based on complex-adaptive systems theory it will develop a service design and modelling method which will help organisations to horizontally adapt to new or changing laws. This method takes the inherent unpredictability and existing situation blocking adaptation into account.
The NWO grant covers two AiO positions and one post-doc. AGILE is a co-operation between the Leibniz Center for Law and the Technical University Delft, O&i Management Partners and the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND).
February 18th, 2008
The TRIAS Telematica project, coordinated by the Leibniz Center for Law, has been selected as one of the five best e-Learning practices in Europe. The methods used to arrive at this conclusion were a combination of desk research, reports and project conclusions deriving from five years, thematic discussions and the validation of conclusions and recommendations in two thematic seminars in Sofia and Copenhagen.
The aims of TRIAS Telematica are to identify the training needs of change agents, process innovators in government agencies who request rethinking of eGovernment services and to create an infrastructure for the exchange of best practices, the exchange of project leaders and students, and the exchange of qualified people among European countries.
For this purpose an e-Learning environment was developed using semantic wiki and various training methods including a simulation game.
A successor project is being planned as well as a second summer course.
For more information on the project see: http://www.triastelematica.org/
February 11th, 2008
The papers of the Jurix 2007 Workshop on Legislative XML are available online here.
January 3rd, 2008
There will be a Workshop on Legislative XML on december 15, 2007 in Leiden, the Netherlands, in conjunction with the JURIX conference.
Continue Reading October 29th, 2007
Call to authors of the ICAIL conference workshops on Legal Ontologies and Semantic Web for Law (LOAIT’07 and SW4Law’07).
As announced at the ICAIL Conference workshops on Legal Ontologies (LOAIT) and on Semantic Web for Law (SW4Law), we intend to edit and publish a book on Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web to be published by IOS Press.
NOTICE: Deadline extended to November 1st.
Editors
Joost Breuker (University of Amsterdam)
Pompeu Casanovas (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Michel Klein (Free University, Amsterdam)
Enrico Francesconi (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica (CNR-ITTIG))
Website
http://www.leibnizcenter.org/losw-07
October 2nd, 2007
We are very pleased to announce the book “15 Years of Knowledge Management”, part of the series on Advances in Knowledge Management of Ergon Verlag. This book contains some significant contributions that represent different issues addressed in 15 years of Knowledge Management research.
Advances in Knowledge Management Vol. 3
Schreinemakers, Jos F. (†)- van Engers, Tom M. (Eds.)
15 Years of Knowledge Management
2007. 263 p. - 150 x 225 mm. Hardcover
ISBN : 978-3-89913-580-0
The book is available through the website of the publisher Ergon Verlag.
For more information, please send an email to Tom van Engers.
September 19th, 2007
The Leibniz Center for Law is part of the consortium that won the open tender for the
development of the national online all-in-one service for environmental permits
(Landelijke Voorziening Omgevingsloket, or LVO) in the Netherlands.
Continue Reading September 6th, 2007
The LeX school is an intensive, 6-day program aimed at providing knowledge of the most significant ICT standards emerging for legislation, an understanding of their impact in the different phases of the legislative process, awareness of the tools based on legislative standards, and the ability to participate in the preparation and use of standard-compliant documents throughout the participate in law-making process.
Continue Reading July 16th, 2007
Jurix 2007 - The 20th Anniversary International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems
First Call for Papers, Tutorials and Workshops
http://www.jurix2007.org
For 20 years now, JURIX conferences have been successful annual international meetings with scholars and practitioners in the field of Legal Knowledge and Information Systems. This year’s anniversary conference runs from December 12-15, 2007 and is hosted by the oldest university city in the Netherlands: Leiden.
(more…)
June 21st, 2007
Workshop on Semantic Web technology for Law
Workshop at ICAIL 2007, the International Conference on AI and Law
Stanford, Palo Alto, CA, June 8 2007
DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MAY 6, 2007
In recent years, the Semantic Web has moved from an experimental playground for computer scientists to a set of standards, techniques and best practices that can be used to solve intelligent information-related tasks in a large, distributed environment. Specifically, it can help with information organization, intelligent search and selective access. In the legal domain there are numerous sources of information maintained by different parties, while there is a shared understanding and meaning of the information. This makes the legal domain in principle suited as an application area for Semantic Web technology. It is however an open question how to apply these techniques fruitfully in the legal domain.
This workshop aims at bringing together researchers with an active interest in using Semantic Web technology in the legal domain. In previous workshops and the related LOAIT workshop, the emphasis was on the structure of legal ontologies, and on methodologies of ontological engineering. In contrast, this workshop will focus on the application of Semantic Web technologies and the required building blocks.
See http://www.cs.vu.nl/~mcaklein/SW4Law/ for more information about deadlines and topics.
April 25th, 2007
We are pleased to announce the release of the LKIF core ontology of basic legal concepts. This ontology was developed within the ESTRELLA project to provide a standard vocabulary for legal reasoning services on the Semantic Web, and especially the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF).
The LKIF ontology is inspired by the commonsense orientation of the (discontinued) LRI Core ontology effort. It consists of 14 ontology modules, describing concepts that range from general concepst such as time, place, change and process to the concepts most central to the legal field such as actions, transactions, beliefs, intentions, expressions and norms.
For more information, please consult the LKIF Core ontology website, browse the online documentation, or download the ESTRELLA Deliverable 1.4.
The ontology can be loaded directly into your favorite OWL Ontology editor from: http://www.estrellaproject.org/lkif-core/lkif-core.owl
April 17th, 2007
Registration for the ICAIL 2007 conference has opened and the results of the review process are in. The Leibniz center will present two papers:
- Legal Atlas: Access to Legal Sources through Maps
Radboud Winkels, Alexander Boer, Erik Hupkes (Full Paper)
- Argumentation Structures in Legal Dossiers
Jobien Sombekke, Tom van Engers (Short Paper)
Papers will be made available through this website. For a full list of accepted papers, please consult the ICAIL 2007 website.
April 17th, 2007
ICAIL 2007 will be held under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), an organization devoted to promoting research and development in the field of AI and Law with members throughout the world. ICAIL provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research results and practical applications and stimulates interdisciplinary and international collaboration.
See http://www.iaail.org.
January 23rd, 2007
On 7-9 December, the annual Jurix conference was held in Paris, at the Université Paris II. At this conference, two papers on the work of the Leibniz Center where presented.
Continue Reading December 13th, 2006
Legal Atlas is a tool for viewing both spatial regulations and the associated geospatial information in the form of maps. It is a showcase of how MetaLex integration with existing standards, such as GML and OWL, can result in robust and feature-rich knowledge management solutions. Please read the included license.
Legal Atlas is being developed within the project Digitale Uitwisseling Ruimtelijke Plannen (DURP; digital exchange of spatial plans), initiated by the Dutch government. Legal Atlas enables dynamic references between spatial regulations (encoded in MetaLex v1.3.1 format) and the associated geospatial information. This information is encoded using IMRO2006, the Dutch government standard for XML exchange of spatial plans. It is compatible with GML 3.1.
References between texts and plans are resolved via SPARQL queries on OWL models of both the regulation and the relevant geospatial information.
For more information, please visit the MetaLex website: http://legacy.metalex.eu/general/legal-atlas-v011a.
August 11th, 2006
The objective of the Workshop is to develop a CEN Workshop Agreement on an Open XML interchange format for legal documents. The CEN Workshop Agreement will be based upon MetaLex.
Continue Reading May 12th, 2006
Since a few days, Google has updated some of the sattelite imagery of the Netherlands (and finally changed the capital from The Hague to Amsterdam) in Google Earth.
This breakthrough allows us to offer (exclusively) a Google Earth Placemark for the offices of the Leibniz Center for Law, in the center of Amsterdam. You can download it here: http://www.leibnizcenter.org/docs/Leibniz-Center-for-Law.kmz.
April 26th, 2006
The annual Jurix conference took place at the Free University Brussels (VUB) on 8-10 december. It was both an intellectually as well as socially rewarding and inspiring event. Many thanks to the organisation!
We had the pleasure of presenting two papers on our work. The first by Alexander Boer - co-authored by Tom van Engers and Radboud Winkels - about a preference-based representation of norms, entitled “Mixing Legal and Non-Legal Norms”. This paper, which is part of his PhD research, argues that legal norms are in may contexts best understood as expressions of a ceteris paribus preference, and that this viewpoint adequately accounts for normative conflict and contrary-to-duty norms. This paper sparked some very interesting discussions, not in the least because of a possible link with the work of Guido Governatori and Antonino Rotolo: “Norm Modifications in Defeasible Logic”
The second paper, by Tom van Engers - a joint research abstract with Ron van Gog and Arian Jacobs - is titled “How Technology can help reducing the Legal Burden” and explains how relatively simple technology can help governments to reduce the burden imposed by legal regulations.
The work by Katie Atkinson and Trevor Bench-Capon, titled “Theory and Practice in AI and Law: A Response to Branting” gives a clear overview of recent, and not-so-recent work in our field, and describes a useful framework for positioning various `branches’ of research. A very insightful paper, and perhaps less controversial than our own Functional Ontology of Law (Andre Valente, 1995).
Many other authors reported on their work, and by the looks of it the field is reaching consensus on the currently most prominent issues: harmonization and modification, linguistic approaches to legal information extraction and retrieval, formal representation of legislation, legal argumentation, and forensics support.
Hopefully the pdf-versions of all papers will soon be available online through the Jurix website.
Jurix Website
Jurix 2005 Conference website
January 16th, 2006
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