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).

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/

Position papers of up to 2 pages on aspects relating to the following subjects are very welcome:

1. Unique identification of (parts of) sources of law, URI’s and URN’s, meaningful identifiers versus meaningless
2. Lowest grain size of identifiable elements in sources of law, what are principles or heuristics for determining a sensible grain size level
3. What set of metadata should be part of such an interchange format
4. How to link (external) models or interpretations of the meaning of sources of law to the original sources
5. Conceptualization of the domain of legislating and legislation, i.e. an ontology of the task of legal drafting and its products

Please send two page position papers, preferably in PDF format, by email to winkels. The deadline for submission of position papers: 23rd November 2007.

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

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

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.

Authors are invited to submit papers on the foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications of legal knowledge and information systems, including but not limited to:

• systems that support lawyers with legal reasoning, document drafting, and negotiation
• systems supporting governance tasks in the life-cycle of legislation, including agenda setting, policy analysis, legislative drafting, implementation by public administration, and monitoring
• systems supporting legal education
• systems for digital rights management
• systems supporting the acquisition and management of legal knowledge
• legal information and retrieval systems
• case studies about applications of legal knowledge systems
• systems for online dispute resolution
• theoretical foundations and models in Artificial Intelligence and Law
• modeling legal norms, concepts, rules, cases, principals, values and procedures (legal ontologies)
• models of legal reasoning, argumentation and evidence
• methods for the verification and validation of legal knowledge systems
• Semantic Web applications in the legal field
• methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems
• document types and schemas for legislation and other legal texts
• legal knowledge systems, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods

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. The Jurix conferences are held under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge Systems.

Papers on other relevant topics are welcome. Deadline for submission of papers is September 9, 2007. Papers should be submitted through the Jurix Conference Management System, using PDF, PostScript or Word format.

Papers should not exceed 10 pages when formatted using the style files and guidelines in the Instructions for Authors. Author instructions and style sheets can be found at the IOS Press site. If not formatted according to the style file, the maximum word count is 5,000.

Finally, proposals for tutorials and workshops are invited. Please submit a short description of the topic. All proposals should be sent to the Program Chair by email.

Important Dates

September 9, 2007
Deadline for submission of papers
September 21, 2007
Deadline for submission of tutorial, workshop and demonstration proposals
October 7, 2007
Notification of paper acceptance
October 20, 2007
Camera-ready paper due
December 12 and 15, 2007
Jurix Workshops/Tutorial
December 13-14, 2007
Jurix 2007 Main Conference

Contact
You can contact us by sending an email to Arno R. Lodder (program chair) to lodder or to Laurens Mommers (organisation chair) to l.mommers.

Program Committee

Arno R. Lodder, VU University Amsterdam & CEDIRE.org, The Netherlands (chair)
Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
Emilia Bellucci, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK
Danieele Bourcier, CNRS CERSA, University of Paris 2, France
Frances M.T. Brazier, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Joost Breuker, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Aspassia Daskalopulu, dpt of comp. & comm. engineering, University of Thessaly, Greece
Tom van Engers, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany
Carole D. Hafner, Northeastern University, USA
Frank van Harmelen, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Jaap van den Herik, Leiden University & Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Peter Keyngnaert, AKTOR Knowledge Technology, Belgium
Gloria T. Lau, Thomson FindLaw & Stanford University, USA
Ronald P. Loui, Washington University St. Louis, USA
Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium
Laurens Mommers, eLaw@Leiden, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Ajit Narayanan, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Kees van Noortwijk, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Anja Oskamp, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Monica Palmirani, CIRSFID, University of Bologna, Italy
Marta Poblet, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Henry Prakken, Groningen University & Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Paulo Quaresma, Universidade de Evora, Portugal
Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Italy
Burkhard Schafer, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Uri Schild, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Leon van der Torre, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Bart Verheij, Groningen University, The Netherlands
Kees de Vey Mestdagh, Groningen University, The Netherlands
Wim Voermans, State and administrative law, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Douglas Walton, University of Winnipeg, Canada
Radboud Winkels, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

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.

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.

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.

With the SEAL supporting environment we will improve cooperation between members of parliament and legislation drafters. The SEAL environment will be based upon open standards and improve exchange between the European legislative processes and national and municipal legislative processes. It will allow for citizen consultation processes.

The project includes three parliaments. An initial working environment is foreseen medio 2007.
This working environment will be tested, refined and implemented in cooperation with the parliaments and legislation drafters during the project.

Website: http://www.eu-participation.eu

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.

See the Metalex website for more information about membership and registration for the kick-off meeting.

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 resear