Leibniz Center for Law

Leibniz Center in SCRIPTed

A short article about our center appeared in the August 2010 issue of SCRIPTed - A Journal of Law, Technology & Society.

Add comment August 16th, 2010

Call for Papers: Jurix 2010

JURIX 2010 - The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

Location and date: University of Liverpool (U.K.), 16th-17th December 2010

http://conference.jurix.nl/2010

For more than 20 years the Jurix Conference has provided an international forum for academics and practitioners in the field of legal informatics for sharing ideas and experiences on the representation of legal content and its representation in computer systems. We invite submission of original papers on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge (foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications). For a list of potential topics see the conference web site.

Papers should be submitted through the Jurix Conference Management System, using PDF, PostScript or Word format, and should not exceed 10 pages when formatted using the styles and guidelines in the Instructions for Authors.

The conference proceedings will be published by IOS Press (Amsterdam, Berlin, Oxford, Tokyo, Washington DC) in their series “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications” before the Conference.

Program Committee Chair
Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Organisation Committee Chair
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, U.K.

Important Dates

• August 29th, 2010 Deadline for submission of abstracts
• September 5th, 2010 Deadline for submission of papers
• September 19th, 2010 Deadline for submission of tutorials, workshops and demonstration proposals
• October 1st, 2010 Notification of paper acceptance
• October 17th, 2010 Camera-ready papers due
• December (14th and) 15th, 2010 Jurix Workshops/Tutorials
• December 16th-17th, 2010 Jurix 2010 Main Conference

Add comment June 10th, 2010

13th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2011)

ICAIL 2011 - 13th International Conference on AI and Law

Monday, June 06, 2011 to Friday, June 10, 2011
University of Pittsburgh School of Law

The 13th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2011) will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, June 6-10, 2011, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law 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.

The field of AI and Law is concerned with:

• the study of legal reasoning and argumentation, using computational methods
• the formal representation of norms, normative actions, normative systems and norm-governed societies and multi-agent systems
• the investigation of techniques from advanced information technology, using law as the illustrative domain
• applications of advanced information technology to support tasks in the legal domain.

ICAIL provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research results and practical applications and stimulates interdisciplinary and international collaboration. Previous ICAIL conferences have been held biennially since 1987, with proceedings published by ACM.

See: http://www.law.pitt.edu/ICAIL2011 for more details.

Add comment April 22nd, 2010

IMPACT project started

Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis

IMPACT is a European Framework 7 project (Grant Agreement No 247228) in the ICT for Governance and Policy Modeling theme (ICT-2009.7.3). The project began January 1, 2010 and will run for three years.

Website: http://www.policy-impact.eu/

1 comment February 22nd, 2010

JURIX 2009 - The 22nd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

JURIX 2009 – 16-18 December 2009, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

The 22nd edition of the Jurix Conference will take place on 17 and 18 December 2009 (Workshops and Tutorials on 16 December). The conference is hosted by the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Program Chair: Guido Governatori, NICTA, Australia
Organizing Chair: Kees van Noortwijk, Erasmus Universitiy Rotterdam, The Netherlands

See: http://www.frg.eur.nl/jurix2009 for more details.

Add comment November 10th, 2009

PhD student position on Argument Reconstruction

The Leibniz Center for Law seeks an outstanding PhD candidate for a new research project called IMPACT in the area of argument reconstruction and formalisation.

Continue Reading Add comment November 10th, 2009

Call for Papers: LOAIT 2009

LOAIT ‘09
3rd Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques
joint with
2nd Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts
June 8th, 2009, Barcelona, Spain

held in conjunction with ICAIL-09
Paper submission: April 3rd, 2009

Over the last years the management of legal information has been significantly influenced by approaches from Artificial Intelligence (AI). In particular, legal reasoning, advanced semantic and cross-language legal information retrieval, legal drafting and document classification, have proved to be fertile areas where ontologies are successfully applied.

The ways in which ontologies are developed and used, can be characterised as either bottom-up or top-down. The two methodologies are usually targeted towards different aspects of legal information. For instance, machine learning techniques are used for legal document classification, legal information retrieval, legal knowledge discovery and extraction; similarly Natural Language Processing technology has been successfully implemented to extract knowledge from legal texts. As the use of these techniques becomes more widespread, it also becomes clearer how to enhance their performance. One way of doing this is to employ structured (domain) knowledge to reduce complexity and support correct reasoning. Legal ontologies play a crucial role in providing such knowledge at various levels of specificity and formality.
On the other hand, legal knowledge representation addresses key issues related to the support of legal reasoning. Here, ontologies play the role of a shared vocabulary or of a (formal) conceptualisation of legal notions. These ontologies often stand in the tradition of legal theory and philosophy, but may be grounded in common sense as well.

The LOAIT workshop aims to offer an overview of theories and well-founded applications that combine Legal Ontologies and AI techniques. The workshop will constitute a valuable opportunity for researchers and practitioners in AI, AI&Law, Legal Ontologies and related fields to discuss problems, exchange information and compare perspectives.
The first and second editions of the LOAIT Workshop, held in conjunction with ICAIL’05 and ICAIL’07, provided a valuable opportunity for researchers and practitioners in Artificial Intelligence and Law to discuss problems, exchange information and compare perspectives on Legal Ontologies and their automatic use.

A selection of papers of LOAIT ‘07 were published in the volume J. Breuker, P. Casanovas, M. Klein, E. Francesconi (eds.) Law, Ontologies and Semantic Web (IOS Press, 2009), collecting state-of-the-art contributions on legal ontologies. These results point at an increasing interest of the larger AI&Law community in the study and the use of Legal Ontologies as well as in Natural Language Technologies for legal information extraction.
Recently ontology learning approaches for the legal domain were discussed in the LREC 2008 Workshop on “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts”, and selected contributions will be published in a Springer volume (Francesconi E., Montemagni S., Peters W., Tiscornia D. (eds.)). These results pointed, and still do, at an increasing interest of the larger AI&Law community in the study and the use of Legal Ontologies.

In this third edition of LOAIT, we would like to focus our attention on two main research area: Legal Knowledge Representation as a top-down approach, and Ontology Learning from Legal Texts as a bottom-up approach on legal ontologies. Authors are invited to submit papers describing original completed work, work in progress, interesting problems, use cases or research trends related to one or more of the topics of interest listed below. Submitted papers will be refereed by two experts based on originality, significance and technical soundness.

Topics of Interest include but are not limited to:

* Knowledge discovery and organization by AI approaches
* Design Patterns in Legal Ontologies
* Ontologies, Legal Standards and machine learning
* Ontologies and machine learning for classification tasks
* Text Categorization and Ontology
* AI techniques on legal standards
* Ontologies and Semantic Web
* Legal Ontologies for Semantic Web Services
* Ontology learning from legal texts, including sub-areas such as ontology customization, ontology merging, ontology extension, ontology evolution, etc.
* Ontology Matching
* Lexicons for Legal Applications (Information Retrieval, Legal Drafting)
* Natural Language Processing and Legal Ontologies
* Natural Language Processing and Legal Information Retrieval and Extraction
* Information Extraction from legal texts
* Engineering of regulatory ontologies: conceptual analysis, representation, modularization and layering, reusability, evolution and dynamics, etc.
* Multilingual and terminological aspects of regulatory ontologies
* Ontological views on models of legal reasoning: regulatory compliance, case-based reasoning, reasoning with uncertainty, etc.
* Experiences with projects and applications involving regulatory ontologies in legal knowledge based systems, legal information retrieval, e-governments, e-commerce
* Modeling legal norms, concepts, rules, cases, principals, values and procedures, methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems
* Regulatory ontologies of property rights, persons and organizations, legal procedures, contracts, legal causality, etc.

Author Guidelines

* Paper length: max. 10 pages
* Paper format: Springer style format
* Paper Submission: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=loait2009
* Proceedings will be published in paper and electronic formats by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)

Important Dates

* April 3, 2009: Paper submission
* April 27, 2009: Notification of acceptance
* May 4, 2009: Camera-ready paper
* June 8, 2009: Workshop

Program Chairs

Nuria Casellas (Institute of Law and Technology, University Autonoma of Barcelona)
Enrico Francesconi (Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG-CNR) Florence, Italy)
Rinke Hoekstra (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam)
Simonetta Montemagni (Institute of Computational Linguistics (ILC-CNR), PISA, Italy)

Program Committee

Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK
V. Richard Benjamins, Telefónica R&D, Spain
Alexander Boer, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The Netherland
Joost Breuker, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The Netherland
Thomas Bruce, Cornell Law School, US
Paul Buitelaar, DERI research institute in Galway, Ireland
Pompeu Casanovas, Institute of Law and Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Aldo Gangemi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR), Italy
Roberto García, Universitat de Lleida, Spain
Mustafa Jarrar, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Michael Klein, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherland
Alessandro Lenci, Department of Linguistics, University of Pisa, Italy
Wim Peters, Natural Language Processing Research Group, University of Sheffield, UK
Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Marco Schorlemmer, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
Erich Schweighofer, University of Vienna, Austria
Barry Smith, University at Buffalo, US
York Sure, SAP Research, Germany
Daniela Tiscornia, Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG-CNR), Italy
Tom van Engers, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The Netherland
Réka Vas, Department of Information Systems, University Corvinus of Budapest, Hungary
Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The Netherland

Add comment March 31st, 2009

Call for Papers: 12th International Conference on AI & Law (ICAIL 2009)

ICAIL 2009 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. Previous ICAIL conferences have been held biennially since 1987, with proceedings published by ACM.

Continue Reading Add comment August 8th, 2008

TRIAS Telematica awarded best practice on e-Learning in Europe

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/

Add comment February 11th, 2008

Workshop on Legislative XML Papers available online

The papers of the Jurix 2007 Workshop on Legislative XML are available online here.

Add comment January 3rd, 2008

Book Announcement: 15 Years of Knowledge Management

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.

Add comment September 19th, 2007

The LVO project

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 Add comment September 6th, 2007

LKIF Core Ontology

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

Add comment April 17th, 2007