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/

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.

IMPACT is an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework programme. It will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. To support the analysis of policy proposals in an inclusive way which respects the interests of all stakeholders, research on tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet will be conducted. The key problem is translation from these sources in natural language to formal argumentation structures, which will be input for automatic reasoning.

The candidate will be working on the design of an argument reconstruction tool, which uses a library of argumentation schemes to support the manual reconstruction of arguments from natural language texts. Moreover, an extension of existing XML formats for weblogs, such as RSS or Atom, will be developed which would enable future weblogs to mark up the structure of arguments in articles in such a way as to enable the arguments to be automatically aggregated, analysed and visualized, without human intervention. The extension may be based on the argument elements of the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF) developed previously by the partners in the ESTRELLA project (IST-2004-027655). The research will result in several publications, including a PhD thesis.
The appointment will be for a period of one year in the first instance. Provided the appointee performs adequately, the appointment will be extended for a further three years. At the end of this period, the appointee will be expected to defend his or her dissertation. The salary will be in accordance with the University regulations for academic personnel.
Highly qualified candidates are sought with a background in computational linguistics, or artificial intelligence, with an interest in argumentation. Experience with semantic web technology and practical IT skills are an advantage. Candidates should be proficient in English.
Applicants should submit: (i) Detailed curriculum vitae, (ii) Two references (and their email addresses), (ii) Transcripts of undergraduate and graduate (if applicable) studies and (iii) concise statement of their research interests (two pages max). Please send all documents in an envelop marked ‘confidential’ to:
Prof.dr. Tom van Engers,
Leibniz Center for Law,
PO Box 1030
1000 BA Amsterdam
Netherlands

Applications (with WWW pointers to studies or papers, if available) can also be submitted electronically (in plain ASCII or PDF format) to vanEngers.
For more information you can contact:
Dr. Radboud Winkels
Tel: +31 (0)20 525 3485
Email: winkels

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

De meeste juristen zijn zogenaamde “kenniswerkers”; bij de uitoefening van hun beroep speelt (juridische) kennis een grote rol. Voor de organisaties waarin zij werken is die kennis een belangrijk productiemiddel. Voor een advocatenkantoor geldt bijvoorbeeld dat de aanwezige kennis van het recht het kantoor een goede concurrentiepositie kan geven. Bij kennismanagement gaat het om het ontwikkelen, toepassen en beheren van deze kennis. Hoe zorgt een organisatie ervoor dat het de kennis in huis heeft, houdt en krijgt om optimaal te presteren en te concurreren?
In het vak Juridisch Kennismanagement wordt bestudeerd hoe organisaties hun juridische kennisinfrastructuur organiseren. Daarbij gaat het om zaken als kennis delen, kennisrepresentatie en -opslag, lerende organisaties, kennis vergaren en kennis ontwikkelen. Vaak wordt hierbij gebruik gemaakt van informatie- en communicatietechnologie.
Naast een theoretisch deel dat in hoorcolleges zal worden toegelicht, moeten studenten in kleine groepjes werken aan een praktische opdracht waarbij uiteindelijk een kleine juridische kennismanagamentoplossing wordt gerealiseerd. Meer dan basis computervaardigheden (tekstverwerken en internetten) wordt niet vereist.

Kloveniersburgwal 48
1012 CX  Amsterdam

Our phone numbers will remain unchanged.

(see map)

December 10th, 2008
Law Faculty, University of Florence (Italy)
within JURIX 2008 Conference (10-13 December 2008)

http://www.ittig.cnr.it/Jurix08
***************************************************

Organizers:
———-
- Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam
- Enrico Francesconi, ITTIG-CNR, Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques, Italian National Research Council, Florence
- Alexander Boer, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam
- Rinke Hoekstra, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam
- Monica Palmirani, CIRSFID, University of Bologna
- Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Fiesole

Audience
——–
Academics, public administrations, publishers, companies in the field of IT and Law

Format
——
Paper presentations followed by discussion

Background
———-
Increasingly, legal documents are available electronically, but in a great variety of formats, published by different organizations, in different countries, jurisdictions, legal traditions and languages. They use different ways to refer internally and externally to other (legal) documents, their versioning information and other metadata differ, if present at all, etc. This makes it very hard to design and build generic software that enables access and provides services based on these sources. Semantic Web technology seems the obvious vehicle to tackle these problems.

This workshop wants to bring together people working on applying Semantic Web technology to solve practical and theoretical problems in the (para)legal field.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Specific representation formalisms or standards for the legal field based on Semantic Web standards and technology (XML, URI’s, RDF, OWL, etc.)
* Legal Ontologies and applications using them
* Metadata for sources of law
* Conceptualizations of the domain of legal drafting and its products
* Web 2.0 applications in the legal domain
* Models of processes inside sources of law
* Mashup in the legal field, content aggregation, integrating legacy databases, etc.
* eGovernment as Web services (e.g. based on WSML, OWL-S, WSDL)

Time Schedule:
————-
Deadline submission position papers: 16th November 2008
Notification of acceptance: 23rd November 2008
Papers should be submitted in pdf format (maximum of 5000 words) through the Easychair Conference Management System, at:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lxml2008

Sponsored by:

• The International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL)
• Autonomous University of Barcelona
• ISOCO, Intelligent Software Components S.A.
• Thomson Reuters

The field of AI and Law is concerned with:

• the study of legal reasoning and argumentation using computational methods
• the study of AI and other informatics fields, using law as an example domain
• formal models of norms, normative systems, norm-governed societies
• legal and quasi-legal applications of AI and other advanced information technologies

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.  Authors are invited to submit papers on topics including but not restricted to:

• Formal and computational models of legal reasoning, argumentation, decision making, and negotiation
• Legal ontologies / representation of legal and related common sense knowledge
• Evidential reasoning and its role in legal decision making
• Modelling norms for multi-agent interaction, regulatory compliance, and electronic institutions
• Modelling contracts and other legal speech acts for electronic agents
• Knowledge discovery in legal databases
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• Automated extraction of information from legal texts
• Computer-assisted legal drafting and document management
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Judicial support systems
• Online dispute resolution
• Legal XML models and semantic web applications
• Legal aspects of multi-agent systems
• Representation of quasi-legal norm-governed systems (e.g. e-commerce rules, organization rules and security regulations)

Papers proposing formal or computational models should provide examples and/or simulations that show the model’s applicability to a real legal problem or domain. Papers on applications should describe clearly the motivations behind the project, the techniques employed, and the current state of both implementation and evaluation. All papers should make clear their relation to prior work.

ICAIL WORKSHOPS AND TUTORIALS

ICAIL 2009 will include workshops and tutorials on the first and last days.  Proposals for workshops and tutorials are invited, and should be sent to the Program Chair.  Proposals should contain enough information to permit evaluation on the basis of importance, quality, and community interest.  Each workshop should have one or more  designated organizers and a program or organizing committee.  Proposals should be about 2 to 4 pages and include at least the following information:

• The workshop or tutorial topic and goals, their significance, and their appropriateness for ICAIL 2009
• The intended audience, including the areas from which participants may come, the likely number of participants (with some of their names, if known), and plans for publicizing the workshop
• Organization of the workshop or tutorial, including the intended format (such as invited talks, presentations, panel discussions, or other methods for ensuring an interactive atmosphere) and the expected length (full day or half day)
• Organizers’ details: a description of the main organizers’ background in the proposed topic; and complete addresses including web pages of all organizers and committee members (if applicable).

MENTORING PROGRAM FOR ICAIL 2009

The International Association for AI and Law will offer a mentoring program for papers being submitted to the ICAIL conference. The mentoring program is intended primarily for authors who have not published at ICAIL previously. For more details see the conference web site: http://idt.uab.cat/icail2009/.

DONALD H. BERMAN AWARD FOR BEST STUDENT PAPER

To encourage participation by students, IAAIL has created the Donald H. Berman Award for the best paper submitted to ICAIL by a student or students. The award consists of a cash gift and free attendance at ICAIL 2009. Notification will be made through the ICAIL web site, and the award will be presented at the conference banquet. For a paper to be considered for the award, the student author(s) should be clearly designated as such when the paper is submitted, and any nonstudent co-authors should provide a statement that the paper is primarily student work.

IMPORTANT DATES

Mentoring program request deadline: November 4, 2008
Mentoring program paper deadline: November 11, 2008
Workshop and tutorial proposals due: December 1, 2008
Submission of abstracts (optional): January 5, 2009
Submission of papers: January 11, 2009
Notification of acceptance: March 9, 2009
Camera-ready copies: April 10, 2009
Conference: June 8 – June 12, 2009

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Papers should not exceed 5000 words.  If an approved style file is used, the maximum length is 10 pages.  To aid the reviewing process, authors are requested to submit abstracts of their papers by January 5, 2009, to the conference system. Abstracts should include at least the title of the paper, up to four keywords, and a contact address for the author. Papers must be submitted electronically on or before the January 11, 2009 deadline using the conference management system (details to be announced).  Style guidelines and detailed submission instructions will be forthcoming on the conference web site http://idt.uab.cat/icail2009/. Authors will be notified of the referees’ decision on March 9, 2009.  Papers not accepted for full publication and presentation may be accepted as short Research Abstracts.  Papers (including Research Abstracts) must be presented at the conference in order to appear in the Proceedings.

CONFERENCE OFFICIALS

Program Chair
Carole Hafner
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University, Room 202 WVH
Boston MA 02115 USA
Email:  hafner  Tel: +1-617-373-5116

Conference Chair
Pompeu Casanovas
UAB Institute of Law and Technology
Political Science and Public Law Department
Campus UAB. Edifici B. Facultat de Dret 08193 Bellaterra.
Barcelona. Spain.
Email: pompeu.casanovas  Tel: +34 93 581 22 35

Secretary/Treasurer
Anne Gardner
286 Selby Lane,
Atherton, California 94027, USA
Email: gardner  Tel: +1-650-368-1297

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Carole Hafner (chair), Northeastern University, Boston, MA USA
Vincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA USA
Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK
Daniele Bourcier, CNRS CERSA, University of Paris 2, France
L. Karl Branting, MITRE, Hanover, MD, USA
Joost Breuker   , University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Pompeu Casanovas, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Jack G. Conrad, Thomson Reuters, St. Paul, MN USA
Anne Gardner, Atherton CA, USA
Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany
Guido Governatori, NICTA, Sydney, Australia
Peter Jackson, Thomson Reuters, St. Paul, MN USA
Andrew J.I. Jones, King’s College London, UK
Marc Lauritsen, Capstone Practice Systems, Harvard, MA USA
Arno Lodder, VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands
L. Thorne McCarty, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ USA
Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium
Anja Oskamp, VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, Italy
Henry Prakken, Utrecht University and University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA USA
Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna, Italy
Burkhard Schafer, University of Edinburgh, UK
Uri Schild, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Marek J. Sergot, Imperial College, London, UK
Tom M. van Engers, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Bart Verheij, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Radboud Winkels, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

For mailing list changes, send an email to secretary.

Lees hier het stuk van Frank Kuitenbrouwer, en hier het stuk van Tom van Engers.

The project will address a couple main issues:
- The automatic creation of amendments and amending laws from a modified text.
- The automatic creation of consolidated legislation based on a number of amendments and an original source.
- The detection of clashes between different amendments on the same source.

Any functionality developed in this project will be added to the MetaVex editor for legislation. This editor has developed by the Leibniz Center, and has been tested and refined in the SEAL project.

Additional information can be found at http://www.ismick.org.

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, Be Informed and the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND).

October 23rd 2008 the official kick-off happened at the IND premises in Rijswijk.

At the LAC conference in Nieuwegein NWO showed a movie about the six new Jacquard projects. The part containing AGILE can be viewed online at: http://www.jacquard.nl/8/assets/File/flv/agile.flv.

April 24 2009 the second official AGILE user meeting took place, again at the IND premises in Rijswijk.

December 11 2009, AGILE was presented at the NWO Jacquard day in Utrecht.

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/

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.

On the basis of an ontological characterisation of legal language DALOS - Drafting Legislation with Ontology-based Support Project intend to provide law-makers and European citizens with linguistic and knowledge management tools to be used respectively in the phase of legislative drafting and in the retrieval procedures.

The expected results will consist in improving the quality of legislation, in enhancing the terminological coherence of legislative texts in multilingual context and in supporting with ontological knowledge the debate concerning the interpretation and implementation of legislative rules as well as democratic participation.

The all-in-one environmental permit application process replaces a number of other services for obtaining permits regulating nuisance caused by alterations to real estate, such as building permits, demolition permits, permits for cutting down trees, billboard advertising permits, etc. Look for instance here, here, and here for more background information (all links are in Dutch).

The main contractor is O & I. Other participants are BeValue, BeInformed, Juris, Informaat, and ASP4all.

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.

The LeX school will address standards concerning different aspects of legislation: abstract (logical) ways of identifying legislative documents, ways of structuring legislative documents and data, ways of dealing with changes in the law, ways of distinguishing and representing the different stages of the life cycle of a law text (from first drafts, to parliamentary discussions, to amendments, to subsequent modifications), ways of defining and applying conceptual classifications to law texts, ways of building executable representations of legislative knowledge.

Organising institutions: CIRSFID (University of Bologna), European University Institute, University of Amsterdam, and ITTIG-CNR (Florence).

Directors: Enrico Pattaro and Giovanni Sartor

Program committee: Tom van Engers, Monica Palmirani, Giovanni Sartor

Scientific committee: Carlo Biagioli, Alexander Boer, Gladys Boss Sholley, Raffaella Brighi, Angelo di Iorio, Enrico Francesconi, Tom Gordon, Caterina Lupo, Pierluigi Spinosa, Daniela Tiscornia, Radboud Winkels, Flavio Zeni

Contact for information: legislativexml

Web site (including the detailed program and link to the application form): http://www.one-lex.eu/Activities/summerschool/legislativexml.html

For more information: http://www.leibnizcenter.org/~winkels/eurohelp.html

Between 1991 and 1995, Valente was a guest researcher in the departments of Computer Science and Law (LRI) and Social Science Informatics (SWI) of the University of Amsterdam. His research in the first department includes results in formal languages for representation of legal knowledge and a model-based approach for legal knowledge engineering. In SWI, Valente participated on the ESPRIT project P5248 KADS-II. His research in this project concerns the development of a library of modeling components to support the development of knowledge-based systems within the CommonKADS methodology. In particular, he was involved in the design of the library and the development of library elements for planning and assessment tasks.

Presently, he is a researcher at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, where he develops research on the Expect Project (a knowledge acquisition architecture with explanation facilities) and the ARPA-Rome Planning Initiative.

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.

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

• 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.

The SEAL environment is based upon open standards and improves exchange between the European legislative processes and national and municipal legislative processes. It also allows for citizen consultation processes.

The project included three parliaments. Within the SEAL project, three editors have been tested, refined and implemented in cooperation with the parliaments and legislation drafters during the project.

Deliverables:
D1.4 Plan for the Pilots
D1.5 Initial Succes Criteria
D2.1 Requirements drafter environment
D3.3 Test Report
D4.5 Final Report

MSc Forensic Science student 2006-2007
Internship Forensic Intelligence
Electronic Tracking of Criminal Offenders using
GIS and Legal Atlas: a Feasibility & Utility Study

See http://www.iaail.org.

First was a paper by Emile de Maat, Radboud Winkels and Tom van Engers, entitled “Automated detection of Reference Structures in Law”. It deals with the outcome of research done for the Dutch Tax and Customs Administrations. In it, the different textual formats used for referring to laws are discussed, and a parser is described that can detect such references with a high accuracy.
The second paper, “Developing content for LKIF: Ontologies and frameworks for legal reasoning” by Joost Breuker, Alexander Boer, Rinke Hoekstra and Kasper van den Berg discusses the steps made towards LKIF, the Legal Knowledge Interchange Format that is being developed as part of the Estrella project.

Leibniz participates in the Bsik “Ruimte voor geo” Geogov project. Together with the Universities of Tilburg , EUR center of Public innovation and the eGov consultancy company Zenc, the Leibniz center investigates the consequences for public administration of standardization and digitalization in the Spatial area of local government in the Netherlands. The research has a long history starting with the Addwijzer project at the Province of Zuid Holland. This project resulted in the first Legal Atlas. When Tom van Engers met with Rob Peters the groundworks for the second Legal Atlas became clear: combine the geographic interface with updateable and maintainable regulations and the general public may have a new search tool for National law, local regulations and related documents. In Geogov we are investigating the use and impact on local public administration of Google Earth as interface for RDF-OWL based ordinances created in the Metalex XML editor for legislation. Leibniz organized a very successful launcing conference at HollandOpen with Chikai Ohazama , the builder of Google Earth and the Dutch GIS world involved in Ruimte voor Geo. A part of the research is the current quality control system of local law. Geogov will end at the end of 2008.

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.

The Legal Atlas v0.09b application 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.

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.

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

PROSA is an instructional environment for learning to construct a legal solution for a specific problem situation

Contact: Antoinette Muntjewerff

e-See is an instructional environment for learning to select legal relevant facts from a real life situation

Contact: Antoinette Muntjewerff

Het gaat om de volgende functionaliteit:

• Ondersteuning bij het helder krijgen van de hulpvraag van de cli�nt
• Ondersteuning bij de juridische advisering aan de cli�nt

Belangrijke doelstellingen van het project zijn het verbeteren van de kwaliteit en van toegankelijkheid tot de juridische advisering door regulering en ondersteuning van het bevragingsproces bij de intake. Bij gebruik van het virtuele Juridische Loket zullen gegevens over de voorliggende vragen worden gebruikt bij het opbouwen van de elektronische dossiervorming ten behoeve van andere vormen van cli�ntondersteuning.

Het project is onderdeel van de inrichting van de nieuwe organisatie het Juridisch Loket. De toegang tot het recht voor burgers zal door het ontwikkelen van het Juridische Loket verder verbeteren. De rechtshulpzoekende wordt laagdrempelige voorzieningen geboden terwijl de beschikbare juridische informatie en kennis wordt vergroot. Rechtzoekenden zullen door het Juridisch Loket beter en sneller geholpen kunnen worden. Een belangrijkste nevendoelstelling van het virtuele Juridische Loket is het terugbrengen van de uitvoeringskosten van gesubsidieerde rechtsbijstand bij het Juridisch Loket door het verminderen van het aantal noodzakelijke fysieke contacten met cli�nten.

ECCAI was established in July 1982 as a representative body for the European Artificial Intelligence community. Its aim is to promote the study, research and application of Artificial Intelligence in Europe

Website: http://www.eccai.org/

Organizer of the annual international BNAIC conference (Belgium-Netherlands Artificial Intelligence Conference).

Website: http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/~bnvki/

Organizer of the bi-annual international ICAIL conference.

Website: http://www.iaail.org/

SIKS is the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge systems. It was founded in 1996 by researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Databases & Information Systems and Software Engineering. SIKS is an inter-university research school that comprises 12 research groups in which currently over 250 researchers are active, including 110 Ph.D-students.

Website: http://www.siks.nl

Website: http://www.jurix.nl

At present Jos Lehmann is collaborating with the Laboratory for Applied Ontology, in Rome, on various themes connected to his research interests: knowledge representation, ontology and causation.

De subsidie bedraagt bijna 330 000 euro en is bedoeld voor het ontwikkelen van modulair elektronisch lesmateriaal over e-Government voor ambtenaren. Het Leibniz Center for Law zal hiertoe leiding geven aan een consortium van leidinggevende organisaties op het gebied van de elektronische overheid.

Inmiddels is aan TRIAS Telematica de status van best price winner project toegekend.

Website: http://www.triastelematica.org

The main technical objectives of the Estrella project are to develop a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), building upon emerging XML-based standards of the Semantic Web, including RDF and OWL, and Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) for interacting with legal knowledge-based systems. To achieve and demonstrate vendor neutrality and independence, translators between the LKIF format and the existing proprietary formats of LKBS vendors participating in the project will be developed.

To demonstrate and validate the Estrella platform, European tax related legislation and national tax legislation of two European countries will be modelled and used in the pilot applications. The finance ministries or tax administrations of several other European countries will take part in an Observatory Board to ensure generality of the approach.

Website: http://www.estrellaproject.org

One of the most important design principles that follows from the common-sense stance in developing the LRI-Core is cognitive plausibility. From this perspective, knowledge about the physical world, with the central notions of object and process is taken as a basis for a mental and abstract worlds. The intentional stance that differentiates the physical world from the mental world is also the basis for the creation of a behavioural world of roles. In summary, LRI-Core starts with four main categories: physical concepts, mental concepts, roles, and abstract concepts. A fifth category consists of terms for occurrences, which are used to talk about instances (situations) in a generic way.

The LRICore ontology effort has been moved to the LKIF Core ontology developed within the ESTRELLA project.

The MetaLex standard is input to the MetaLex/CEN workshop standardisation effort.

Website: http://legacy.metalex.eu

CASE is an environment that supports both the search for legal precedents and the structuring and analysis of the specific slected precedent to be able to establish its legal significance.

Website: http://darius.lri.jur.uva.nl/case
Contact: Antoinette Muntjewerff
Partners:

• Open Universiteit Nederland

The development of a Manual for Transitional Provisions in the Law is a key step in improving the quality of the law.

Website: http://www.leibnizcenter.org/leidraad/leidraad.htm
Partners:

• Ministerie van Justitie